The New Politics of Materialism

New materialism challenges the mechanistic models characteristic of early modern philosophy that regarded matter as largely passive and inert. Instead it gives weight to topics often overlooked in such accounts: agency, vitalism, complexity, contingency, and self-organization.

This collection, which includes an international roster of contributors from philosophy, history, literature, and science, is the first to ask what is “new” about the new materialism and place it in interdisciplinary per- spective. Against current theories of new materialism it argues for a deeper ­engagement with materialism’s history, questions whether matter can be “lively,” and asks whether new materialism’s wish to revitalize politics and the political lives up to its promise.

Contributors: Keith Ansell-Pearson, Sarah Ellenzweig, Christian J. Emden, N. Katherine Hayles, Jess Keiser, Mogens Lærke, Ian Lowrie, Lenny Moss, Angela Willey, Catherine Wilson, Charles T. Wolfe, Derek Woods, and John H. Zammito. This page intentionally left blank The New Politics of Materialism History, Philosophy, Science

Edited by Sarah Ellenzweig and John H. Zammito First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York City, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Sarah Ellenzweig and John H. Zammito; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sarah Ellenzweig and John H. Zammito to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or ­reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, ­mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including ­photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or ­retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-24074-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-26847-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Contents

Notes on Contributors vii Acknowledgements xi

Introduction: New Materialism: Looking Forward, Looking Back 1 Sarah Ellenzweig and John H. Zammito

PART I Materialist Prehistories 17

1 Who’s Afraid of Inertia? The Cartesian–Newtonian Legacy Reconsidered 19 Sarah Ellenzweig

2 Varieties of Vital Materialism 44 Charles T. Wolfe

3 Plastic Matters 66 Jess Keiser

4 Deleuze and New Materialism: Naturalism, Norms, and Ethics 88 Keith Ansell-Pearson

PART II Humanities and the Sciences of Matter 109

5 Materialism, Old and New, and the Party of Humanity 111 Catherine Wilson vi Contents 6 Engendering New Materializations: Feminism, Nature, and the Challenge to Disciplinary Proper Objects 131 Angela Willey

7 What Sort of Thing Is the Social? Or, Durkheim and Deleuze on Organization and Infrastructure 154 Ian Lowrie

PART III Monism, Liveliness, and the Problem of Scale 179

8 The Cognitive Nonconscious and the New Materialism 181 N. Katherine Hayles

9 Scale Variance and the Concept of Matter 200 Derek Woods

PART IV The Politics of Ontology 225

10 Detachment Theory: Agency, Nature, and the Normative Nihilism of New Materialism 227 Lenny Moss

11 Materialism, Constructivism, and Political Skepticism: Leibniz, Hobbes, and the Erudite Libertines 250 Mogens Lærke

12 Normativity Matters: Philosophical Naturalism and Political Theory 269 Christian J. Emden

Concluding (Irenic) Postscript: Naturalism as a Response to the New Materialism 300 John H. Zammito

Index 323 Notes on Contributors

Keith Ansell-Pearson holds a Personal Chair in Philosophy at the University of Warwick, England, a position he has held since 1998. He is the author of close to 100 essays in journals and edited book collections. His books include Nietzsche contra Rousseau (Cambridge University Press, 1991/1994), Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (Routledge, 1999), Bergson and the Time of Life (Routledge, 2002), and Thinking Beyond the Human Condition with Bergson (Bloomsbury, 2017). He is also the editor of Bergson: Key Writings (Bloomsbury, 2006, 2014), A Companion to Nietzsche (Blackwell, 2006), and The Nietzsche Reader (Blackwell, 2006). He is currently researching a book on ethics and the art of life in Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze. Sarah Ellenzweig is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Rice University. She is author of The Fringes of Belief: English Literature, Ancient Heresy, and the Politics of Freethinking, 1660–1760 (Stanford University Press, 2008). She has published essays in ELH, Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of British Studies, and MLQ. Her recent work on the history of materialism and the philosophy of motion appears in edited volumes from Oxford University Press and University of Toronto Press. She is currently working on a book on the philosophy of motion and the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century. Christian J. Emden is Co-Director of the Program in Law, Politics & Social Thought and Professor in the Department of Classical and European Studies at Rice University, where he teaches modern intel- lectual history and political thought. He is the author of four books, most recently Nietzsche’s Naturalism: Philosophy and the Life Sciences in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History (Cambridge University Press, 2008). He also edited, with David Midgley, Beyond Habermas: Democracy, Knowledge, and the Public Sphere (Berghahn Books, 2012) and Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere (Berghahn Books, 2012). Emden is currently working on three projects: one on normativity and viii Notes on Contributors philosophical naturalism, the second on political realism in the work of Max Weber and Hannah Arendt, and the third on political citizenship in a postnational world. N. Katherine Hayles is the James B. Duke Professor of Literature at Duke University. She teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science, and technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her book How We Became Posthuman (University of Chicago Press, 1999) won the René Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory in 1998/9, and her book Writing Machines (MIT Press, 2002) won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Her most recent book is entitled Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Jess Keiser is Assistant Professor of English at Tufts University. He has published essays on early modern materialism, satire, and madness.­ His current book project, Nervous Fictions, examines the use of ­figurative language in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century descriptions of the brain; portions have appeared in Modern Philology and English Literary History. Mogens Lærke is a permanent researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France with an affiliation at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. He is the author of Leibniz Lecteur de Spinoza. La Genèse d’une Opposition Complexe (Champion, 2008) and Les Lumières de Leibniz. Controverses avec Huet, Bayle, Regis et More (Classiques Garnier, 2015). He is the editor of The Use of Censorship in the Enlightenment (Brill, 2009) and co-editor of The Philosophy of the Young Leibniz (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2009), Spinoza/Leibniz: Rencontres, Controverses, Réceptions (Presses Universitaires de Paris Sorbonne, 2015), and Philosophy and Its History (Oxford University Press, 2015). He is the author of more than fifty articles and book chap- ters on a variety of issues in early modern philosophy. Ian Lowrie is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at Rice University whose empirical research focuses on the emergence of data science. He has two ongoing projects. The first investigates emergent forms of academic- industrial collaboration, pedagogical techniques, and forms of inquiry specific to the conduct of data scientific education and research within the Russian science system. The second studies rapprochements between computational neuroscience and data science, with an eye to understand- ing ongoing transformations in widely circulating analytical approaches to brains and cognition. Lenny Moss is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Exeter and is a former molecular cell biologist. As a philosophically motivated research scientist Moss was interested in questions of cellular self-assembly, Notes on Contributors ix membrane biophysics and biochemistry, and the relationship of cancer to development. As a scientifically motivated and trained philosopher, Moss has come to be interested in engaging and renewing the critical tradition from Kant and Hegel, through Nietzsche and Heidegger, to Habermas and Honneth through an “anthropological optic.” Moss has given numer- ous invited lectures throughout Europe and North America and has pub- lished in a wide range of philosophical and scientific journals. His 2003 book What Genes Can’t Do (MIT Press) was translated and published in Japanese. He is currently working on a monograph on detachment theory and a co-authored monograph in theoretical biology with fellow scientist/ philosophers Stuart Newman and Sahotra Sarkar. Angela Willey is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She works at the interstices of queer feminist theory, feminist science studies, and sexuality studies. Her work has appeared in Feminist Studies, Signs, Journal of Gender Studies, Archives of Sexual Behavior, and Sexualities, and in volumes on monogamy, the science of difference, and the global history of sexual science. She is the author of Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology (Duke University Press, 2016). Catherine Wilson is Anniversary Professor of Philosophy at the University of York and Distinguished Professor at CUNY Graduate Center. She has written extensively on the reception of Epicurean materialism in the sev- enteenth and eighteenth centuries and on metaethics and normative eth- ics, including topics related to biology and morality. She is the author of The Invisible World (Princeton University Press, 1995), Moral Animals: Ideals and Constraints in Moral Theory (Oxford University Press, 2004), Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2008), A Very Short Introduction to Epicureanism (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Metaethics from a First-Person Standpoint (Open Book, 2016). Charles T. Wolfe is a Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences and Sarton Centre for History of Science, Ghent University, and an associate member of the IHPST (CNRS-UMR 8590, Paris). He works primarily in history and philosophy of the early mod- ern life sciences, with a particular interest in materialism and vitalism. He is the author of Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction (Springer, 2016). He has edited several volumes, including Monsters and Philosophy (Kings College Publications, 2005), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge (with O. Gal, Springer, 2010), Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life-Science (with S. Normandin, Springer, 2013), Brain Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Philosophy of Biology before Biology (with C. Bognon-Kuss, Routledge, x Notes on Contributors in progress), along with articles in journals including Early Science and Medicine, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Journal of the History of Biology, Perspectives on Science, Science in Context, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, and others. His current project is a monograph on the conceptual foundations of Enlightenment vitalism. He is also the Co-Editor of the Springer series in History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences. Derek Woods is a doctoral candidate in English at Rice University. His research areas include Anglo-American literature, environmental lit- erature, and science and technology studies. His dissertation project addresses shared figurative structures in mid-twentieth-century ecosys- tem ecology and speculative fiction. Woods has been a fellow in the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and is cur- rently a fellow in the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice. His publications appear or are forth- coming in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, The Minnesota Review, Victorian Literature and Culture, American Literary History, and the collections Size and Scale in Literature and Culture and Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geological Time. Woods is also co-author of an endangered species report on the lichen Leptogium platynum for the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. John H. Zammito is John Antony Weir Professor of History at Rice University. His research focuses on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and of his student and rival, Johann Gottfried Herder, as well as on the history and philosophy of science and the philosophy of history. His key publi- cations include: The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (University of Chicago Press, 1992), Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (University of Chicago Press, 2002), and A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (University of Chicago Press, 2004). His current research involves the life sciences in Germany in the eighteenth century and a monograph entitled The Gestation of German Biology is forthcoming from Chicago. Acknowledgements

This volume was put together with the generous support of the Humanities Research Center (HRC) at Rice University. We wish to thank its Director, Farès El-Dahdah, and Nicholas Shumway, Dean of the School of Humanities. Our project received an initial grant from the Humanities Research Innovation Fund in 2012-13 and then took shape as a Rice Seminar in 2013-14. We are indebted to our visiting speakers and to the scholars in residence during our seminar year. The fantastic staff at the HRC, Carolyn Adams and especially the indomitable Lauren Kleinschmidt, helped our pro- gram run smoothly and efficiently. We also wish to thank the Department of History and the John Antony Weir Professorship of History, endowed by Mr. and Mrs. Bruce Dunlevie. The Department of English and the Program in Sexuality, Women, and Gender Studies at Rice provided additional sup- port. Annie Lowe’s research assistance in preparing the manuscript was indispensable. We are grateful to the anonymous readers at Routledge for their helpful comments and to our editor, Tony Bruce, for marshaling the volume through to publication. This page intentionally left blank Introduction: New Materialism Looking Forward, Looking Back

Sarah Ellenzweig and John H. Zammito Rice University

In their farthest-reaching ambitions, today’s “new materialisms” propose to mobilize and radicalize energies across the humanities and beyond for cultural and political interventions from the local to the global level.1 The present volume is an effort to assess and engage with this revitalized interest in matter from a similarly interdisciplinary vantage. We contextualize our approach in the same frame in which new materialism has situated itself: the crisis of the academic humanities in the midst of global crisis. Indeed, we might well begin with just this notion of crisis and its intrinsic dynamic of danger and opportunity. First, the humanities find themselves in crisis both within the academy and vis à vis the wider world. Why the humanities matter and why they should be supported have become questions of vital concern. If the humanities are to resolve their internal crisis, they must establish what real difference they make both within and beyond the academy. One strat- egy of humanistic discourse has been to dwell on crisis, making it a topos of inquiry. Thus, the humanities seek their mission and warrant in providing a recourse/resource for crisis; interpretation becomes (political) intervention. Long ago, Karl Marx ([1845] 1978) disparaged merely interpreting the world; the point, he asserted, was to change it (145). The rejoinder of the humanities is that only by interpreting the world in a new and percipient manner can we find the orientation through which to change it. Interpretation grounds inter- vention. And it is on this basis that the new materialism puts itself forward. It is on this basis that we shall here appraise it. Arising out of internal contestation within the academic humanities, the new materialism poses challenges to the method of humanistic inquiry— its resources and style (expression, interpretation, evaluation)—and to the meaning of humanistic inquiry—its topos and telos. New materialism attacks a long tradition of liberal humanism and Enlightenment which it takes to be irredeemably complicit in imperialism, global capitalism, and the oppression or destruction of vulnerable populations—human and non- human—and indeed of the inanimate world: the earth, the seas, and the skies. New materialism takes the privilege of the human—with its supposed marks of exception in rationality, subjectivity, and agency—to have been the ideological supplement that the humanities have contributed to the 2 Ellenzweig and Zammito juggernaut of capitalism, technoscience, and political domination. Much is at stake here, for “humanism” is seen to have participated in generating a crisis of geological scale—the “Anthropocene.”2 But new materialism also had a more local context of emergence and dispute: its rejection of what had been a preponderant impulse even in oppo- sitional rhetorics in the humanities for the preceding generation—the so- called “linguistic turn.”3 This earlier theoretical project aimed to undercut the very same conventional discourse of humanism, but on the methodologi- cal and political basis of a still more discursive interpretation of language, agency, and human subjectivity. It proposed critique, to be sure, but by dis- seminating the interior of culture and consciousness. For new materialism, theory’s long-standing constructivist enterprise failed to acknowledge the lively productivity of matter itself, and in this way unwittingly continued to privilege the human agent and its self-proclaimed unique characteristics, even if undermining its complacency and efficacy. The impulse behind the new materialism is decidedly posthumanist, deliberately decentering the human into the encompassing dynamics of the world—a critique, as it were, from the outside in. If dissolving the first person into aporia was the goal of the linguistic turn, bringing a relentlessly third-person vantage to bear on human pretensions in the world seems key to posthumanist new materialism. Now, the third-person view has long been the prerogative of science, and one of the most important dimensions of new materialism is its relation to (natural) science. “Science” as cultural construct and practice has long been a problematic issue for humanistic understanding.4 Not only has techno- science played a central role in global subjection and ecological disaster, but the discourse of “science” has also asserted hegemony within the acad- emy, claiming for its method an exclusive warrant (truth), a direct access to the constituents and processes of the world (reality), and, consequently, an equally direct efficacy in manipulation and control of the world (power). For a generation or more, the humanities have undertaken a searching investigation into these postures, under the rubric of “science studies.”5 The origin of many impulses behind posthumanist new materialism can be traced to science studies and especially feminist science studies.6 And yet, new materialism now endeavors to move beyond this largely adversarial relation to “science.” As one of our contributors (Willey) puts it, there is in this impulse a strong desire to be “science-friendly” (135). In part at least, this desire is a result of the effort to break free from the first-person confines of traditional humanist appraisal to the third-person vantage that science ostensibly provides. But, as the new materialist Myra Hird (2004) helpfully articulates, there are three dimensions to the humanistic relation with (natural) science: cri- tique, engagement, and extraction. Critique, as we have suggested, aims to deflate the pretense of science to epistemic sovereignty and ubiquitous impact. The new materialism seeks to move beyond this critique to engage- ment with the sciences, a common endeavor occasioned by the common New Materialism: Looking Forward and Back 3 ground of third-person methodology and even more by a common atten- tion to the materiality in which the human is so thoroughly imbricated. This engagement with the natural sciences—life sciences, above all—raises crucial questions regarding extraction, i.e. what, from the actual practices of the sciences, should the new materialism take up as established fact, and how is that to be incorporated into humanistic interpretation, notwithstand- ing the implications of prior critique? Of this whole constellation there will be much that needs to be considered. Materiality is clearly the common ground, but what is the semantic range of this concept? What is materiality? Should we begin with the verbal form: to matter? How do we tease out the crucial difference between causal effi- cacy and meaningful consequence? Can the humanities fulfill their mission or even exert any significant intervention if they accept without question scientific models of causal efficacy and, still worse, of indifference to con- sequence? Or should we begin with the substantive sense of matter? What exactly is matter? How adequately does “matter” characterize the “mate- rial” world? Beyond ontology (what there is) looms the question of agency (what has an impact on the processes that constitute the world). New mate- rialism presses for the widest possible distribution of agency in its project of decentering the human. Beyond causal force is the question of worth— what matters in the outcomes of these processes? Does it change the politi- cal landscape of the world to accentuate the material in and over against the human? How does materiality become materialism? Is that primarily a philosophical theory or an ideological agenda? Is the line from ontology to politics straightforward or even determinable at all? New materialism wants more than anything to be a political intervention. If it arose within the humanities, its energy, force, and mission have always been directed outward, to change the world. To do that, it has sought to mobilize the rest of the humanities and to forge alliances with impulses in the social as well as in the natural sciences. Since we share the view that the humanities must engage with other elements within academic culture and still more with the cultural and political forces gripping our planet, we wish in this volume to assess what the new materialism offers in this frame. To make sense of any of this we must ask about the means new material- ism adopts to hold its agenda together. What are the arguments? What is the evidence? How coherent is the program, whatever its good intentions? We must submit new materialism to the interpretive critique which is the métier—the skill and the calling—of humanistic discourse. If we submit its claims to critique, it is for the sake of engagement (to retrieve Myra Hird’s categories). It is not enough to approve or disapprove. First, we will endeavor to understand, so that we can go on to explicate and evaluate.7 That is a lot to undertake. But just such an undertaking is what any substan- tive proposal demands and deserves. Three major domains structure our investigation. First, we will ask, what is new about new materialism? The idea of the “new” invokes conceptual 4 Ellenzweig and Zammito and also temporal novelty. Both call for historical appraisal. Next, we will ask: what is materialist about it? This question calls for a consideration of what there is (ontology) and about how it acts (agency; causal efficacy). Thus the domains of philosophical and natural scientific inquiry constitute our second topical focus. Finally, the “-ism” that transfigures materiality as a topos into materialism as a telos bespeaks a political motivation. Following this political-theoretical impulse, our third focus will be on normativity and the political agenda at stake in the claims of new materialism.

Novelty: The Status of History “Make it new” has been the pervasive feature of modernity in the ­humanities. This imperative animated the expressive movements that called themselves avant-garde and shaped the trajectory of the modern arts, but it also ani- mated a permanent revisionism in interpretive studies (history, criticism, theory), impelling a succession of “movements” and “turns” in the styles of inquiry. This general pattern has provoked a specific skepticism, enunci- ated by one of the outside reviewers the press solicited for this volume, that new materialism might well be just another fad in an ephemeral and largely inconsequential sequence of fashionable trends going back at least to the linguistic turn itself. Such suspicion is part of the hermeneutic of humanistic inquiry, but it should never preempt the examination of claims to novelty, for without these the humanities would be condemned to stasis. Thus we must be willing to assess new materialism’s claims to novelty. There have been two core claims. The first is against the linguistic turn, and the second is against an “old” materialism. How are we to assess these claims? What vantage should we adopt in the historical assessment of change? Are innovations annihilations of what went before, supersessions without remainder? Or are there dialectical concatenations? Is what has gone before simply a “nightmare from which we strive to awaken” or a resource to carry us forward in the face of problematic futures? Indeed, is past thought invari- ably surpassed thought? Is our presentism, the adamant urge to use every possibility for current concerns, incompatible with historicism, the recogni- tion of the claims and aspirations of other times in their own right? Is there a usable past? And what difference does it make to get that past right? Our view is that these are crucial concerns. Our suspicion is that there is always continuity across change. Thus the linguistic turn lingers as a legacy within much of the discourse of new materialism. Indeed, there may even be ele- ments carried forward from the all-too-despised humanism of older vintage. But our primary interest here will be with the question of “old” material- ism. What exactly was that? Was it just one thing? Is it entirely superseded? Ought it to be? These are pressing questions for our contributors. For new materialism, the right appreciation of matter’s vital ontology begins with repudiating the passive mechanistic worldview of Descartes, Newton, and classical science, all of which, as Diana Coole and Samantha New Materialism: Looking Forward and Back 5 Frost (2010) argue, defined matter “as extended, uniform, and inert” (7). Our historical investigations of materialism’s pasts demonstrate both that the sensitivity to matter’s lively properties was even more developed and widespread in earlier traditions than new materialism has recognized, and also that new materialism’s aversion to mechanistic theories of matter, attributed most frequently to Descartes, relies on an overly simplistic, often tendentious account of the history of early science and natural philosophy. As Peter Harrison (1992) cautions, for example, to “castigate” Descartes for authoring the doctrine of “the ghost in the machine” is to fail to appre- ciate that in “successfully banish[ing] ghosts from all machines except the human,” Descartes opened the door to the kind of naturalistic explanation on which any critique of human exceptionalism must be based (227). Was a belief in passive matter in fact the problem we say it was? And if it was not, then do we need a new materialism in quite the way we think we do? In his essay “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” Bruno Latour (2014) observes that “one of the main puzzles of Western history is not that there are people who still believe in animism, but the rather naive belief that many still have in a de-animated world of mere stuff” (8). Latour’s comment is curious, for in stressing the degree to which people’s purported belief in material inanimacy is a puzzle, he comes close to acknowledging that it may not be a fair assessment of what people think (and have tended to think) after all. Perhaps, in other words, our default position has not been to claim with such gross naïveté that the world is fundamentally de-animated. A central claim of our volume is thus that we need to rethink the dichoto- mous and often ideologically charged opposition between passive and active matter so frequently mobilized in recent conversations about materialism. From this dichotomous thinking, we argue, arise several key problems for the reception of materialism among ethically minded scholars of the twenty- first century. While seeking to dismantle human exceptionalism and related hierarchical thinking, new materialism frequently takes inspiration from the post-secular movement in the humanities. Jane Bennett, for example, is ready to embrace “quasi-pagan” superstition, animism, and a divinized nature “because the mood of enchantment may be valuable for ethical life” (Bennett 2001, 12, 3; 2010, 120).8 Bennett (2001) is well aware that embracing enchantment con- troverts the disenchantment narratives of modernity, but for her these have led us to “a place of dearth and alienation” (3). While enchantment opens us to the vitality of human and nonhuman bodies, disenchantment for Bennett imagines a natural world that is dead, inert, alienated, and instrumentalized. Yet in conceiving matter’s vitality via the rubric of enchantment, new mate- rialism seems oddly unaware that it breaks tradition with a long-standing and, we would argue, crucial aspect of materialism’s heritage—its natural- ism and its staunch secularism.9 Catherine Wilson’s chapter points out that beginning with Epicurus, materialism’s progressive stance was inextricable from its rejection of religion and any investment in supernatural, immaterial 6 Ellenzweig and Zammito entities. As Lucretius’ first-century BCE Epicurean poem De Rerum Natura makes clear, the vitality of matter was precisely what emerged once we dis- carded forms of enchantment. In a strangely anachronistic gesture, Bennett (2001) calls Epicurean materialism a “neopagan” or “enchanted” material- ism because it repudiates “the dull matter of a disenchanted world,” yet far from repudiating disenchantment, Epicurean materialism was itself one of the first agents of same (73, 18). The problem comes down to whether one agrees that disenchantment, or the related and recently maligned term, “secularity,” is the source of today’s ills. In a provocative reading of these tensions, Bruce Robbins (2011) argues that our perceived need for enchantment stems from the mistaken view both that disenchantment happened in the first place and that it was or would be a bad thing (77).10 For Robbins (2001), if modernity appears bleak, alienated, and meaning-deprived, the culprit is not disenchantment and rationality but rather their failure: “In short, disenchantment is the wrong diagnosis. And reenchantment is the wrong remedy,” he concludes (92). Most importantly, as Robbins (2013) shows in his critique of the work of Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood, the post-secular position becomes potentially dangerous “when a break with secularism or rationality is … taken as the defining criterion of political resistance” (60). Keith Ansell-Pearson’s chapter suggests similar inconsistencies around new materialism’s embrace of Gilles Deleuze as a figurehead for its posthumanism. In neglecting Deleuze’s earlier work of the 50s and 60s, particularly his work on Lucretius and Spinoza, Ansell- Pearson argues, we miss Deleuze’s contribution to philosophical naturalism and his ethical commitment to emancipating the human from the realm of myth and superstition. These are incongruities that any “new” materialism needs to address. As Charles Wolfe’s chapter argues, our commonplace sense, recently made so much of in new materialism, that the history of materialism was “mechanistic,” finds vivid articulation in Engels’ chapter on materialism in his Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. As Engels sees it, eighteenth-century materialism “was predominantly mechanical” because physics reigned supreme in the natural sciences, a situation that led to a misguided “application of the standards of mechanics to processes of a chemical and organic nature” (Engels 1976, 22).11 Wolfe suggests that Engels, clearly critical of the limitations of this mechanical vision, might well be considered the first “new materialist,” yet he also shows what Engels (and his new materialist successors) leave out, namely a rich and com- plex early-modern history of vital, non-mechanistic materialism advanced by figures like John Toland, Anthony Collins, Diderot, and La Mettrie. While Wolfe grants that not all early modern materialism was vitalistic or embodied, he also asks us to consider the ways that the term “mechanistic materialism” is incongruous: most early modern mechanists were in fact substance dualists and not accurately described as materialists at all. In a comparable effort to nuance today’s rather blunt picture of the history of New Materialism: Looking Forward and Back 7 materialism, Ellenzweig’s and Keiser’s chapters emphasize the ways that mechanism and materialism, activity and passivity, are more closely allied and interwoven than we tend to think. Ellenzweig seeks to complicate the shibboleth known as the “Cartesian–Newtonian legacy” through a closer examination of Descartes’ and Newton’s matter theory and its reception in the period, focusing particularly on the early history of the concept of inertia. In a similarly revisionist approach to Descartes, Keiser’s history of the concept of neuroplasticity from Descartes through to Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou shows how neurophysiology cannot be captured by simple passive/active dichotomies. The posthumanist program with which much of new materialism is in sympathy tends to perpetuate critical theory’s distrust of the Enlightenment and its twin, secular humanism, seeing both as a hegemonic legacy that underwrites the supremacy of the Western, human subject.12 Yet this posi- tion articulates only part of a more complex picture. As Foucault (1996) usefully points out, Enlightenment “reason” in its first pass was a radi- cally destabilizing engine, a form of anti-authoritarian “reflective indocil- ity.” Enlightenment reason thus allowed for the critical interrogation of existing power structures, most theologically based, in a way that had not hitherto been imaginable (386). We do well here to remember Foucault’s call in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” (1984) to refuse “the black- mail of the Enlightenment”: one need not endorse particular doctrinal ele- ments from the Enlightenment, which may not stand the test of time, in order to appreciate and recognize the power of “a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era.” In this way, we avoid the impossible trap of having “to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ the Enlightenment” (42–43).13

Materiality: Science and Ontology As its fundamental claim to novelty, new materialism affirms “vital” matter over and against an alleged “old” scientific and philosophical view of mat- ter as inert. In this gesture, new materialism aligns itself with a new science of self-organization, systematicity, and dynamic processes, one that seeks to overturn the mechanism and linearity of classical science and its philosophi- cal counterparts. Accentuating vital matter as the basis of the world and its processes, new materialism displaces the privilege of the human by finding agency everywhere. Not only does new materialism’s account of agency blur the animal-human boundary, it also challenges the boundary between the animate and the inanimate, discovering a plural world of “actants” that shape all natural process, including those previously regarded as strictly human interventions.14 The new materialism extracts from the new science an understanding of what there is, how it works, and even, in a measure, what difference that makes. That is, new materialism believes it can draw upon the new science for a conceptualization of the flux of the world that 8 Ellenzweig and Zammito would open crucial spheres of freedom—a freedom shared far beyond the exclusively human. If materialism of a vitalist variety is thus recently “on the move,” emerging, among critically engaged theorists in the humanities, out of the obscurity of a repressed past, it is clearly because contempo- rary political commitments to posthumanism and critical environmentalism within a biopolitical frame have highlighted its relevance in newly pressing ways (Coole and Frost 2010, 2). New materialism seeks a particular kind of theoretical ballast from recent work in the physical and biological sciences, work which reveals a material world composed of forces, energies, dynamic processes, and open, complex systems (13–15). But can we be so confident that this is indeed what—or all—the new science portends? Is there only new science? Is new science only one thing? Is the material world as we now conceive it through the sciences one continuous series, like a set of Russian dolls opened up by one uncon- tested method? How can we warrant specific extractions from an actually quite plural and even equivocal science and confidently call that a material world of suitably determinate ontology and process? In particular, is the vitality discerned in natural processes uniform across all the scales of the material world? Is flux agential in any sense that warrants confidence in its liberatory implications? There are crucial issues of scale variance and norma- tivity that must be addressed. Our contributors suggest that a more nuanced and extensive engagement with the sciences and science studies helps us to qualify matter’s liveliness, to see that matter is not all active in the same ways. We need to understand better in what contexts it may be more useful to explore matter’s relative inanimacy, its states of equilibrium, stasis, and pre- dictability, and in what contexts it makes sense to delineate its capacities for self-organization, creativity, indeterminacy, and change across diverse scales of life and nonlife. Indeed, as Derek Woods’ chapter shows, a deeper inves- tigation of scale domains suggests that the concept of “matter” has little real meaning from the purview of the natural sciences. As Woods cautions, “mat- ter could get in the way of an ontology suitable to what ‘matter’ can do” (24). What is more, new materialism’s post-secular, anti-Enlightenment ethos, its distrust of “secular scientific rationality,” exists in latent tension with its desire to draw on new developments in the physical and biological sciences.15 For Rosi Braidotti (2013), for example, Western humanism’s “investment in rationality and secularity as the pre-condition for development through science and technology” is to be rejected but “the current scientific revo- lution, led by contemporary bio-genetic, environmental, neural and other sciences” is celebrated for its ability to “create powerful alternatives to established practices and definitions of subjectivity” (48, 54). New materi- alism’s tendency to gloss over such contradictions, to refrain from grappling more explicitly and self-consciously with its vexed relationship to science and its history demands further consideration. To the extent that modern scientific practises, on Jane Bennett’s account, are seen to be a major agent of disenchantment, one question that arises is whether new materialism can New Materialism: Looking Forward and Back 9 productively endorse enchantment and a new openness to science at the same time?16 New materialists would likely argue that the disenchanting science they reject is an old science of determinism, rigid quantification, and rationalization, not the latest science of complex systems and emergent properties, yet there is nonetheless a way in which, as Angela Willey com- ments in her chapter, “science remains a startlingly undertheorized object” in new materialism (135). One major symptom of this lack of rigor is new materialism’s preference for science that endorses its vision of active, vital matter and its celebra- tion of flux. But scientific inquiry reveals matter with a range of capaci- ties, not all of them vital and active, some of them latent, arrested, limited, even inert.17 As Katherine Hayles’ chapter argues, much of new materialist writing makes it difficult to differentiate betweenkinds of agencies, some more or less active, more or less linear, more or less predictable. Along with accounts of flux, indeterminacy, and variation, we need to allow for moments of balance, cohesion, predictability, and endurance, and even for material forces “whose actions are deterministic” (194), a possibility that new materialism appears loathe to admit. A fuller engagement with science and scientific practices would reinforce this insight, particularly, as Lenny Moss’ chapter argues, as we attempt to move our analysis of material pro- cesses across differing scale domains and differing levels of life and non-life. More attention to scale domains indeed reminds us that constraint is as much a material reality as possibility.

Politics: Normativity and Political Theory The new materialism is committed to the notion that it can derive a poli- tics from an ontology. But can it? Is ontology a necessary and sufficient platform for political action? Does it have unequivocal implications? Can one even get from “is” to “ought”? Does (new) materialism generate, and does it warrant a specific politics? Does it warrant the politics to which the new materialists are already unequivocally committed? New materialism invests in an ontology of vital matter in order to ensure new forms of politi- cal action and engagement, yet it has not been able to demonstrate why or how its ontology yields a progressive political stance. As one instance of this hazard, both Robbins and Catherine Malabou, among other critics, have demonstrated that “flux” (so championed among new materialists as an inherently revolutionary force across the range of levels of material sub- stance) is probably not what new materialism wants to promote in, say, the economic realm: matter’s unpredictability, indeterminism, and plas- ticity, they point out, are in fact the ideal expression of global capitalism and its “force for chaos” (Robbins 2011, 92; Malabou 2008, 40–46).18 In his chapter, Mogens Lærke’s example of Thomas Hobbes illustrates that materialism as ontology in fact fails to provide grounding for any politics (progressive or otherwise). In a similar vein, Woods’ chapter shows that 10 Ellenzweig and Zammito evidence of scale variance—of jumps, discontinuities, rifts, constraints, and qualitative differences across levels and registers—disproves attempts like Karen Barad’s to move seamlessly from a micro quantum register to macro social theory. As Christian Emden’s chapter similarly contends, whether, for example, we should value democracy “cannot be answered by an appeal to the molecular structure of our cells,” even though such normative questions do “depend on what we are as natural beings” (289). The “social,” as Ian Lowrie demonstrates, is a scale or dimension of order of its own, with bind- ing forces and internal rules. Without an account of normativity, of why and how certain claims become possible in the first place and of what gives them binding force, new materialism risks making irresponsible and incoherent ethical and political judgments.19 The essential issue with which the humanities and the sciences must grap- ple is how to understand normativity and how to apply it in their respective domains. Where does normativity come from? How does it “matter”? Is it the same across all scales of material process? What is the relation between degrees of difference across scales and degrees of agency—not only as causal force but also as moral-political responsibility? These questions bear as much on epistemic claims as on ethico-political ones. As Woods, Moss, and Emden all suggest, there are different scales of (“intra-acting”) normativity, some more binding than others. Moreover, as several critics have noted, the extension of agency to nonhumans can have a surreptitious way of avoiding the problem of how we think responsibly through human political action and ethical engagement, a problem, as our contributors argue, that requires addressing the sources of normativity, an area conventionally neglected in new materialist arguments.20 New materialism has distrusted normativity as a concept that invariably implies value judgment (humanist, anthropocentrist, etc.) but in avoiding the problem of normativity, new materialism actually risks endorsing its own stated enemies. Emden and Moss demonstrate that this problem is una- voidable to the extent that any critique always already entails normative demands. For Moss, as for Emden, if new materialism aspires to be con- sistent with its own stated aims and commitments, it cannot legitimately continue to avoid specifying the sources of normativity (here the central normative focal point would again be the concept of agency) for its science or for its politics. Indeed, as both insist, it is only within the context of nor- mative space that one can speak meaningfully about agency at all. A paradoxical corollary of neglecting normativity is that emphasizing the agentic capacities of nonhumans in fact re-projects human values onto nature rather than moves us beyond our values.21 New materialism’s eager- ness to extend agency to objects, in other words, does little to unsettle a uniquely human obsession with agency and its correlates—selfhood, ration- ality, choice, intention, mastery—in the first place. In this sense, new mate- rialism’s politics betrays the same anxiety about passivity, dependency, and subjection as does its ontology. Perhaps it is time to question this anxiety, New Materialism: Looking Forward and Back 11 to return some attention to passivity and constraint, inertness and stasis, and to consider how they exist in complex and varied relation to activity, vitality, and agency. Can we really dissolve all distinctiveness of the human and still articulate political demands and assign political responsibilities? In what measure is a posthumanist new materialism caught in performative contradiction, given the moral fervor of its demand on human agents to change the world in a progressive direction? These are the ultimate stakes in our assessment of new materialism.

Notes 1 See, for example, Coole and Frost 2010, esp. 1–47; Bennett 2010; Braidotti 2002 and 2013; De Landa 2006; Barad 2007; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012; Connolly 2013a; 2013b; Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Hird 2004; Grosz 2004 and 2011. 2 On technoscience, see Latour 1990 and 1993; on the Anthropocene, see Chakrabarty 2009; Latour 2014. 3 On the “linguistic turn,” see Saussure (1916) 1983; Jakobson 1960; Derrida 1978; Foucault 1972; Barthes 1967; Lacan (1953–1955) 1988; Lyotard (1979) 1984; Kristeva (1969) 1980; Irigaray (1977) 1985; Culler 1982; Cahoone 2003; Adams and Allan 1995. 4 See the exemplary volume, Science as Culture and Practice (Pickering 1992). 5 See Biagioli 1999; Galison and Strump 1996; Latour 1987; Shapin 1988. 6 See Harding 1986 and 1991; Tuana 1989; Bleier 1986; Keller 2001; Keller and Longino 1992; Haraway 1989 and 1991; Longino 1990 and 1992; Nelson and Nelson 1996; Hayles 1993; Gergen 1988. 7 “To judge a thing that has substance and solid worth is quite easy, to comprehend it is much harder, and to blend judgement and comprehension in a definitive description is the hardest thing of all” (Hegel 1977, 3). 8 See Andrew Cole’s (2016) comment in his review of the new vibrant material- isms that one of its features is to allow “that sometimes there are ghosts in the machine” (23). 9 Christoph Cox and Suhail Malik 2016 urge new materialism to discard “the theological hangover … in all its varieties” (27). 10 See also Robbins 2013. 11 On the terminological complexity of mechanism, see Garber and Roux 2013, xi–xviii; Gabbey 2002, 337–38; Bertoloni-Meli 2006a, 2006b and 2011. 12 See Braidotti 2013, 31–37. 13 Foucault’s notion of “permanent critique” provides a solution of sorts to Horkheimer’s complaint that “Reason” dissolves all metaphysical concepts up to itself (see Horkeimer 1996, 366). 14 Latour 1992b; Johnson (AKA Bruno Latour) 1988; Latour 1992a, 1994a, and 1994b; Latour and Callon 1981; Callon and Law 1989 and 1995; Callon 1991. 15 See Braidotti 2013, 37; Coole and Frost 2010, 95; Connolly 2013b, 402. 16 See Bennett 2001, 60–62. 17 See, for example, Roosth 2014. 18 For the view that Malabou’s critique does not go far enough, see Victoria Pitts- Taylor 2010, 647–48. For the view that new materialism’s vital materialism unwittingly approximates a “metaphysics of capitalism,” see Cole 2015, 323. 19 Note Mel Y. Chen’s (2016) concern that “fictions of scale” in new materialisms end up obscuring “lived differences such as race, class, sex and ability” (22). It may be the case that attention to scale variance does a better job on this front. 12 Ellenzweig and Zammito 20 On the problem of human ethical engagement, see Johnson 2008; Johnston 2014, 295–323; Connolly 2013b, 400–402. On new materialism’s tendency to “jump the gap” from ontology to politics, see also Johnston 2014, 299. 21 See Cole 2015; see also Bryan-Wilson 2016, 17–18; Cox and Malik 2006, 26; Wood 2016, 107.

References Adams, Barbara, and Stuart Allan, eds. 1995. Theorizing Culture: An Interdisciplinary Critique after Postmodernism. London: University College London Press. Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan Hekman, eds. 2008. Material Feminisms. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1967. Elements of Semiology. Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. New York: Hill & Wang. Bennett, Jane. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bertoloni-Meli, Domenico. 2006a. “Mechanics.” In Cambridge History of Science: Vol 3: Early Modern Science, edited by Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, 632–72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bertoloni-Meli, Domenico. 2006b. Thinking with Objects: The Transformation of Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bertoloni-Meli, Domenico. 2011. Mechanism, Experiment, Disease: Marcello Malpighi and Seventeenth-Century Anatomy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Biagioli, Mario, ed. 1999. The Science Studies Reader. New York: Routledge. Bleier, Ruth, ed. 1986. Feminist Approaches to Science. New York: Pergamon. Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Bryan-Wilson, Julia. 2016. Contribution to “A Questionnaire on Materialisms.” October 155: 16–18. Cahoone, Lawrence, ed. 2003. From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, 2nd Ed. London: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd. Callon, Michel. 1991. “Techno-economic Networks and Irreversibility.” In A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, edited by John Law, 132–61. London: Routledge. Callon, Michel, and John Law. 1989. “On the Construction of Sociotechnical Networks: Content and Context Revisited.” Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Science Past and Present 8: 57–83. Callon, Michel, and John Law. 1995. “Agency and the Hybrid Collectif.” South Atlantic Quarterly 94 (2): 481–507. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2): 197–222. Chen, Mel Y. 2016. Contribution to “A Questionnaire on Materialisms.” October 155: 21–22. New Materialism: Looking Forward and Back 13 Cole, Andrew. Summer 2015. “Those Obscure Objects of Desire.” Artforum Summer: 318–23. Cole, Andrew. 2016. Contribution to “A Questionnaire on Materialisms.” October 155: 23–25. Connolly, William E. 2013a. The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Connolly, William E. 2013b. “The ‘New Materialism’ and the Fragility of Things.” Millennium 41 (3): 399–412. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cox, Christoph, and Suhail Malik. 2016. Contribution to “A Questionnaire on Materialisms.” October 155: 26–28. Culler, Jonathan. 1982. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. De Landa, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society. London and New York: Continuum. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Engels, Friedrich. 1976. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. English ed. Peking: Foreign Languages Press. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “What Is Enlightenment?” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 32–50. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, Michel. 1996. “What Is Critique?” In What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth- Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, edited by James Schmidt, 382–98. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gabbey, Alan. 2002. “Newton, Active Powers, and the Mechanical Philosophy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Newton, edited by I. Bernard Cohen and George E. Smith, 329–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Galison, Peter, and David Strump, eds. 1996. The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Garber, Daniel, and Sophie Roux, eds. 2013. The Mechanization of Natural Philosophy. New York: Springer. Gergen, Kenneth. 1988. “Feminist Critique of Science and the Challenge of Social Epistemology.” In Feminist Thought and the Structure of Knowledge, 27–48. New York: New York University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2011. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haraway, Donna. (1984) 1986. “Primatology Is Politics by Other Means.” Originally in PSA 1984, Vol. 2. Revised and included in Feminist Approaches to Science, edited by Ruth Bleier, 77–118. New York: Pergamon. Haraway, Donna. 1989. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge. 14 Ellenzweig and Zammito Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Harding, Sandra. 1986. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harding, Sandra. 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harrison, Peter. 1992. “Descartes on Animals.” Philosophical Quarterly 42(167): 219–27. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1993. “Constrained Constructivism: Locating Scientific Inquiry in the Theater of Representation.” In Realism and Representation, edited by George Levine, 27–43. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hird, Myra J. 2004. “Feminist Matters: New Materialist Considerations of Sexual Difference.” Feminist Theory 5 (2): 223–232. Horkheimer, Max. 1996. “Reason against Itself: Some Remarks on Enlightenment.” In What Is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, edited by James Schmidt, 359–67. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Irigaray, Luce. (1977) 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter. New York: Cornell University Press. Jakobson, Roman. 1960. “Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics.” In Style in Language, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, 350–77. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Johnson, Barbara. 2008. Persons and Things. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Johnson, Jim (AKA Bruno Latour). 1988. “Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer.” Social Problems 35: 298–310. Johnston, Adrian. 2014. Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Keller, Evelyn Fox. 2001. “Making a Difference: Feminist Movement and Feminist Critique of Science.” In Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology, and Medicine, edited by Angela Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Londa Schiebinger, 98–109. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Keller, Evelyn Fox, and Helen Longino, eds. 1996. Feminism and Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kristeva, Julia. (1969) 1980. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Edited by Leon S. Roudiez. Translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, Jacques. (1953–1955) 1988. The Seminar. Books I (Freud’s Papers on Technique) and II (The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis). Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by J. Forrester (Book I) and Sylvana Tomaselli (Book II). New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Latour, Bruno. 1990. “Postmodern? No, Simply Amodern: Steps Towards an Anthropology of Science. An Essay Review.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 21: 145–71. Latour, Bruno. 1992a. “One More Turn after the Social Turn: Easing Science Studies into the Non-Modern World.” In The Social Dimension of Science, edited by Ernan McMullin, 272–94. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. New Materialism: Looking Forward and Back 15 Latour, Bruno. 1992b. “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts.” In Shaping Technology/Building Society, edited by Wiebe Bijker and John Law, 225–58. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1994a. “On Technical Mediation—Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy.” Common Knowledge 3 (2): 29–64. Latour, Bruno. 1994b. “Pragmatogonies: A Mythical Account of How Humans and Nonhumans Swap Properties.” American Behavioral Scientist 37 (6): 791–808. Latour, Bruno. 2014. “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.” New Literary History 45 (1): 1–18. Latour, Bruno, and Michel Callon. 1981. “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan; or How Actors Macro-Structure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So.” In Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies, edited by Karin Knorr-Cetina and A. V. Cicourel, 277– 303. Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Longino, Helen. 1990. Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Longino, Helen. 1992. “Essential Tensions—Phase Two: Feminist, Philosophical, and Social Studies of Science.” In The Social Dimension of Science, edited by Ernan McMullin, 198–216. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. (1979) 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Malabou, Catharine. 2008. What Should We Do with Our Brain? Translated by Sebastian Rand. New York: Fordham University Press. Marx, Karl. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. Edited by Robert Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton. Nelson, Lynn Hankinson, and Jack Nelson, eds. 1996. Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Pickering, Andrew, ed. 1992. Science as Culture and Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pitts-Taylor, Victoria. 2010. “The Plastic Brain: Neoliberalism and the Neuronal Self.” Health 14 (6): 635–52. Robbins, Bruce. 2011. “Enchantment? No, Thank You!” In The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now, edited by George Levine, 74–94. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Robbins, Bruce. 2013. “Why I Am Not a Post-Secularist.” Boundary 2 (40): 55–76. Roosth, Sophia. 2014. “Life, Not Itself: Inanimacy and the Limits of Biology.” Grey Room 57: 56–81. Saussure, Ferdinand de. (1916) 1983. Course in General Linguistics. Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Translated by Roy Harris. La Salle, IL: Open Court. Shapin, Steven. 1988. “Following Scientists Around.” Social Studies of Science 18: 533–50. Tuana, Nancy, ed. 1989. Feminism & Science. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Wood, Christopher S. 2016. Contribution to “A Questionnaire on Materialisms.” October 155: 105–107. This page intentionally left blank Part I Materialist Prehistories This page intentionally left blank 1 Who’s Afraid of Inertia? The Cartesian–Newtonian Legacy Reconsidered

Sarah Ellenzweig Rice University

… we are free from the difficulty in which the Schoolmen find themselves when they wish to explain why a stone continues to move for some time after leaving the hand of the person who threw it. For we should ask, instead, why does the stone not continue to move forever? René Descartes, The World (w. 1632)

New materialism’s bid for novelty hinges on the claim that we understand ontology better now than philosophers did in the past. As the story goes, what has recently been referred to as the “Cartesian–Newtonian” legacy misconstrues matter as mere extended stuff—passive, inactive, inert. To be a “new” materialist, by contrast, is to appreciate that matter is lively, dynamic, and agential, and to denounce seventeenth-century mechanistic thinking about matter’s inertness (Coole and Frost 2010, 8).1 New materialist writing thus celebrates its recovery of active matter as an explicitly polemical correc- tion on history. Since so much of new materialism relies on a supersessionist reading of the history of philosophy, it’s important to get that history right.2 To this end, this chapter will examine Descartes’ and Newton’s matter the- ory with an eye toward assessing the novelty of new materialism’s claims and how best to understand present theory in relation to our past. As the coinage “Cartesian–Newtonian” suggests, when new materialists discuss seventeenth-century ideas about matter, they tend to lump Descartes and Newton together, assuming that their purported thinking about mat- ter’s inertness is interchangeable. This is the first place where new material- ism gets its history and its philosophy wrong and thus does today’s theory a disservice. As I will argue, we need to be wary of recent references to a “Cartesian–Newtonian” legacy, as such references often oversimplify and elide, muddying the history of materialism just when we need illumination most. This chapter will distinguish Descartes’ and Newton’s views on mat- ter in order to bring them back together in a different place, all with the aim of clarifying materialism’s complex history, its ontological stakes, and its continued relevance to today’s theoretical concerns and investments. New materialists won’t be surprised by my assertion that Descartes’ and Newton’s ideas about matter come together around their articulations of 20 Ellenzweig what, since Newton, we have called the law of inertia. Yet this does not mean that Descartes’ and Newton’s conceptions of matter are the same or that they necessarily view matter as inert in the sense that has typically been ascribed to them. For lay audiences, inertia is perhaps one of the most poorly understood principles in the history of science. For physics, “inertia” presumes that matter will persist indefinitely in its existing state of recti- linear motion or rest (if nothing external intervenes). In everyday practice, however, we tend to use the word inertia in precisely the opposite sense; inertia commonly indicates not matter’s persistence (in a given state) but its lazy propensity not to move. According to conventional wisdom, in other words, one would assume that if matter has inertia, its character is to be sluggish and passive. To make matters more confusing still, in the early seventeenth century, the physical theories of Kepler did assume matter to display “inertia” (Kepler’s preferred term) or “inertness” in just this con- ventional sense. Though Kepler began to allow for the modern idea that a motion, once initiated, will continue of itself, his physics generally remained true to the Aristotelian assumption that moving bodies inherently seek rest.3 Neither Descartes nor Newton saw it that way. In fact, historians of sci- ence point out that Descartes was so uncomfortable with Kepler’s notion of inertia that he avoided using the term completely in his physics, though he is often credited with anticipating the theory (what he termed his “first law of nature”) (Cohen 1999, 101). As Descartes wrote to Marin Mersenne in December 1638, when it came to matter and motion, “I don’t recognize any inertia or natural sluggishness in bodies.” And when Newton revived the designation “inertia” in his Principia (1687), introducing its modern technical sense into the history of science, he, like Descartes, never meant to invoke Kepler’s earlier meaning, noting the following clarification in his annotations for the second edition: “I do not mean the Keplerian force of inertia by which bodies incline to rest, but a force maintaining (them) in the same state of rest or of motion.”4 Through examining the shared complexities of Descartes’ and Newton’s theories of motion and how they were received in the period, I will make the admittedly bold claim that, strictly speaking, neither Descartes nor Newton really thought that matter was inert. Our prevailing assumption that they did think so bears testament, I suspect, to the success of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century “physico-theology,” the ideological appropriation of the mechanical philosophy by theologians to protect science against the twin threats of atheism and materialism.5 By explicitly and polemically empha- sizing again and again across their writings that matter is “dull, stupid, and lifeless,” completely without efficacy barring the participation of an imma- terial agent, theologians like Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and Richard Bentley manipulated a set of conceptions about the nature of material substance that were far more intricate and complex in their original form. The theological appropriation of mechanism, in other words, produced a flattened, often tendentious reading of the primary philosophical sources, Who’s Afraid of Inertia? 21 one that sacrificed nuance to protect a supernaturalist ontology against the threat of a naturalist one, a threat posed by the very mechanist principles the theologians strove to shape. Some might object that in the strictest philosophical sense, the theo- logians’ anxiety was misguided, that More’s and Cudworth’s worry that Cartesianism led to materialism and naturalism, for example, is merely a mistaken idiosyncrasy of reception. My own view is that the attacks on Cartesianism in the period reveal the complexity of Descartes’ thinking about matter quite accurately; my assumption throughout this chapter will be that More’s and others’ immediate intuition that there were mate- rialist consequences incipient in Descartes’ system were in fact remarkably astute. From this more nuanced vantage point, new materialism’s version of the Cartesian–Newtonian tradition begins to look more and more like a straw-man.6 Among the commonplaces of our current critical moment is the post-dualist view that we need a dynamic concept of materiality, one that “question[s] the seemingly stable borderline between the organic and the inorganic” (Lemke 2015, 64). I will argue that, polemical rhetoric aside, the seventeenth-century materialism hunters understood that this borderline has never been so stable. They knew all too well that natural philosophy was sensitive (to them, dangerously so) to the ways that matter exists along a continuum of relative activity and passivity. My hope is that this chapter might encourage us to ask how useful it is to continue to reprimand the philosophical past for a simplistic, benighted account of matter over which today’s advancements are allowed to triumph far too easily. What is more, in reducing the real complexity of the Cartesian–Newtonian legacy to a simple belief in passive matter, new materialism unwittingly con- tinues the thread of More’s and others’ centuries-old ideological appropria- tion of mechanism and ironically bears testament to the enduring success of their bowdlerizations. We would do well to reconsider today’s confident assumption that the Cartesian–Newtonian legacy saw matter “as sheer exte- riority, … devoid of interiority or ontological depth.”7

A New Descartes? Going back to Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), Descartes’ famous definition of body seems to assume matter’s inertness indeed.8 In his Second Meditation, he establishes that a body is that which has shape and loca- tion, occupies space, and is apprehended by the senses. Though body “can be moved in various ways,” it cannot move itself, “[f]or, according to my judgement, the power of self-movement, like the power of sensation or of thought, was quite foreign to the nature of a body.”9 Though this passive conception of body, the logical extension of Cartesian dualism, has long been seen as the hallmark of Descartes’ philosophy, it existed in tension with his science and his physics as articulated in his lesser known works, The World (1632) and Principles of Philosophy (1644). The definition 22 Ellenzweig of matter in chapter 6 of The World, for example, says nothing explicit about its passivity. Matter is considered simply to be “a real, perfectly solid body which uniformly fills the entire length, breadth and depth of this huge space.”10 Principles is similarly silent on the question of inherent passivity: “the nature of matter, or body considered in general, consists … simply in its being something which is extended in length, breadth and depth.”11 It is striking, moreover, that we learn the nature of matter’s motion across thirty-five philosophical “articles” in Principles before hearing anything about motion’s supposedly necessary immaterial cause, a fact that reinforces one’s sense that in the domain of physics, dualism’s elevation of incorporeal agency seems less clearly established.12 When we arrive, in article 36 of Principles, at Descartes’ view that “God is the primary cause of motion,” that he “created matter, along with its motion and rest; and now, merely by his regular concurrence, he preserves the same amount of motion and rest in the material universe as he put there in the beginning,” what exactly he means by this metaphysical claim, prac- tically speaking, is and was far from self-evident.13 Descartes explains that strictly speaking, motion’s cause is twofold: (1) God and (2) the ongoing transfer of action between particular colliding bodies. Though theoretically God is the only real agent in Descartes’ universe, maintaining the quantity of motion that he first created in it, his physics leaves readers notoriously unclear about the difference between primary and secondary causation, where one ends and the other begins (Westfall 1971, 61).14 What is more, since bodies begin to move from the first creation of matter, it becomes dif- ficult to say that matter was, or ever is, in a state of non-motive inertness.15 Cartesian bodies are simply always moving. As Henry More worries in a letter to Descartes, that moment when the divine motive agent “touched the matter of the universe,” both “at some time in the past” and “even now” has little conceptual distinctness in Descartes’ system.16 Though a pious point of origin, Descartes’ God threatens to be an empty placeholder in his physics. Far from being a lone wolf, More voices the concern of many seventeenth- century readers, coining the term “Cartesianism” in 1660 to convey a dis- quieting set of crypto-materialist ideas seen to threaten Christian piety.17 In the 1640s and 1650s, More largely supported Descartes’ mechanism, believing it to demonstrate the limitations of body on its own terms. Like Descartes, More was a dualist, and he was attracted to dualism precisely because it appeared to ensure a strict separation between passive matter (“inert and stupid of it self”) and the active immaterial source of its motion (More 1662, 38).18 Yet Descartes’ maverick assertion that the universe is a plenum, that matter and body are not distinguishable from the indefinite extension of space, and thus that the parts of matter touch each other on all sides to perpetuity profoundly threatened this separation.19 In More’s cor- respondence with Descartes in the 1640s, as well as in his writings against atheism and materialism from the late 1650s through the 1670s, he insists, in opposition to Descartes’ plenum, that a properly orthodox account of Who’s Afraid of Inertia? 23 inert matter must differentiate body, a created, finite, and dependent thing, from the infinity and eternity of divine space.20 More rather shrewdly rec- ognized that Descartes’ account of matter and motion in a plenum has an unexpected way of suggesting that motion somehow arises from bodies themselves. Though it is God who ostensibly conserves the motion said to remain constant in the whole of extension, the recourse to God in Descartes’ explanation of motion appears to be superfluous, for the secondary laws of nature would seem to be adequate to the task at hand (Garber 1982, 294).21 Descartes’ “first law of nature”—the view, as previously mentioned, that “each and every thing, in so far as it can, always continues in the same state; and thus [that] what is once in motion always continues to move”—is a nagging instance of this problem.22 More allows the first law to be true if he reads Descartes to mean simply that matter “has not any real or active propension to Rest more then to Motion, or vice versa, but is merely passive and susceptive of what Motion or Fixation some other Agent confers upon it.” Yet he fears that Descartes in fact implies something bolder: as More sees it, Cartesian matter “moveth it self and fixeth it self from its own immedi- ate nature,” which if admitted, denies the role of “an Incorporeal Substance distinct from Matter.” Descartes does not say so, but for More, his first law effectively threatens to deny matter’s inertness.23 From early on, More was troubled by Descartes’ assertion that unim- peded motion will persist. While it was easy enough for More and other proponents of passive matter to accept that a body at rest continues at rest, the corollary that matter perseveres in its state of motion seemed to con- tradict matter’s required passivity.24 Cudworth (1678) concurred about the dangers of this particular “Cartesian Hypothesis”: the idea that “A Body Moving, will as well continue in Motion, as a Body Resting in Rest,” opens the possibility that “One Body should be Moved by Another Infinitely, with- out any first cause or Mover” (843). To prod Descartes into affirming that matter is essentially inert, More challenged him in their correspondence to specify whether “matter, supposing it to be eternal or created yesterday, left to itself, and receiving no outside impulse from anything else, would move or be at rest?” In his final letter to Descartes, he again pressed the same question: is matter in and of itself motive or at rest?25 Descartes’ equivocal answer likely did little to alleviate More’s worry: “I agree that if matter is left to itself and receives no impulse from anywhere it will remain entirely still. But it receives an impulse from God who preserves the same amount of motion or translation in it as He placed in it at the beginning.”26 Matter left to itself may well be still, but matter is not left to itself. God sustains motion but so does the first law of nature. That Descartes’ hedged answer ultimately throws More back on Descartes’ dubious and unintelligible conservation law merely compounds More’s suspicion that for all intents and purposes matter in Cartesian physics is not passive.27 Descartes’ first law of nature preoccupies More throughout his writings, and he attempts to have the last word on Descartes by reframing the law 24 Ellenzweig to suit a notion of matter that is properly inert. His Immortality of the Soul (1659) begins by emphasizing, against Cartesian physics, that because inert matter incontrovertibly cannot move itself, every moved thing must have a mover.28 Motion, in other words, is emphatically not inherent in the matter that moves and if motion “does necessarily continue till some part or other of Matter has justled it out,” we are under no misunderstanding that the cause of motion tracks back to “an Incorporeal Substance distinct from ... Matter.” Indifferent to motion or rest, matter preserves the modi- fication imposed upon it “exactly and perpetually, till again some other Agent change it.”29 The point is repeated in his Divine Dialogues (1668) even more definitively: “[M]atter does not move nor actuate itself, but is or has been always excited by some other, and cannot modify the motion it is excited into, but moves directly so as it is first excited, unless some external cause hinder it” (More 1743, 98). More redirects Descartes’ first law of nature in two strategic ways here. First, he articulates the law in a negative form as opposed to Descartes’ posi- tive form. In place of Descartes’ positive assertion that what is once in motion continues to move, More declares that matter does not move itself. Second, in stressing so urgently that matter does not move of itself, More deflects atten- tion off the moving body (Descartes’ concern) and back onto the cause or agent that for him must explain its every motion. (Significantly, in The World Descartes mentions no causal agent for his first law except to say that the laws of nature “follow manifestly from the mere fact that God is immutable and that, acting always in the same way, he always produces the same effect.” In the official version of the law in Principles he says only that we know certain laws of nature “from God’s immutability.”)30 The point to recognize here is that contrary to how More would have it, Descartes’ first law conspicuously de-emphasizes an outside agent of motion. Indeed, More’s emendations could not have done a better job of misrepresenting the stakes of the new physics of motion for modern science, for, as Richard Westfall (1971) argues, “the central question … [is] not what causes motion, since the state of motion is held to endure without the continued operation of a cause, but what causes changes of motion” (59). In insisting, against Descartes’ innovation, on specifying the agent of a continuing motion, More succeeds in manipulating Descartes’ physics—misleadingly—to prove matter’s self-inactivity. We are now in a better position to appreciate Descartes’ avoidance of the term inertia in his first law. His point, however More attempted to amend it, was to emphasize the persistence of a body’s motion and its power to resist change.31 As he put it in Principles, “everything tends, so far as it can, to per- sist in the same state.” Westfall shrewdly observed long ago that Descartes’ choice of the verb “persist” suggests an underlying capacity for activity in matter that the mechanical philosophy otherwise appeared to deny.32 While one could not say that mechanistic matter is in any strict sense self-moving, in a looser sense, Descartes himself admitted that it is, confirming what would be More’s anxieties in an early letter to Mersenne on his first law: Who’s Afraid of Inertia? 25 “It is a mistake to accept the principle that no body moves of itself. For it is certain that a body, once it has begun to move, has in itself for that reason alone the power to continue to move, just as, once it is stationary in a certain place, it has for that reason alone the power to continue to remain there.” The surprising upshot of Descartes’ physics, as Ian Leask suggests, is thus that it becomes possible to imagine the movement of matter “on something like its own immanent terms.”33 For this reason Cudworth explicitly prefers Aristotle’s system as “more consistent with Piety,” his vision of nature providing a comfortable fusion of the physical and the spiritual, of matter and the forms that give them meaning.34 On the subject of ontology, the Aristotelians had taught that all things are made up of matter, which is unintelligible in its own right, and form, the ideas that organize matter and make it significant. Forms ema- nate from the soul or essence of things so that bodies and souls cannot be separate entities in themselves. The end result of this system, as Jonathan Israel (2001) observes, is that there is “no observable or measurable dividing line between the ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’” (17). The unexpected point to appreciate here is that Descartes’ dualist separation of immaterial mind and material body, made notorious by modern theory, in fact allows for the distinction between natural and supernatural (critical to any version of materialism) to achieve a new and sharper kind of ontological resonance. In distinguishing body from an immaterial principle, Cartesian dualism left body precariously independent, precariously autonomous. Descartes may not have envisioned or projected that dualism would lead to the rise of body as an autonomous entity (indeed, I think it is fair to say that he most decidedly did not), yet his lack of intention does not change the fact that over the long haul, we have him to thank for both the birth, and, in a certain sense, the demise, of dualism. We arrive here at a fasci- nating paradox in the history of philosophy, one that is crucial to a more nuanced appreciation of the history of materialist ontology. Descartes was in no deliberate sense a materialist, upholding, as we know, the existence of an immaterial soul that was separate from body and turning to God as the foundation of his physics. Yet More and Cudworth help us appreciate that his desire to explain matter on its own terms laid the groundwork for the next logical move: that there is no separate immaterial substance, that functionally, matter is all there is, and if it is all there is, it cannot be wholly passive and inert.

From Descartes to Newton (to Lucretius) Newton would likely have been appalled at any reference to a “Cartesian– Newtonian” legacy. No text was more important to the development of his natural philosophy than Descartes’ Principles, yet Newton’s primary aim in his Principia was to overthrow his predecessor and knock Principles off the shelf. In this effort, he was highly successful. Indeed, Descartes’ Principles 26 Ellenzweig remains an obscure text largely because Newton’s refutation of Cartesian physics was so extensive and so thorough. Descartes’ name is notably absent from Principia, yet in an earlier tract, De Gravitatione (discovered late and not published until 1962), Newton devoted thirty pages to a critique of Descartes’ system, seeking “to dispose of his fictions” (Newton 2014, 28). What is more, Newton’s critique of Descartes can be read as an attempt to save physics from the threat of materialism. Like More, Newton argued against Descartes that eternal space and extension were distinct from finite, created bodies, and that to assert otherwise had troubling theological impli- cations. Newton agreed with More that by placing the essence of matter in extension alone, Descartes made matter infinite, eternal, and necessar- ily existing, thus confusing the distinction between what is passive and dependent and what is active and omnipotent. “If,” Newton argues, “we say with Descartes that extension is body, do we not manifestly offer a path to Atheism? ... Indeed, however we cast about we find almost no other reason for atheism than this notion of bodies having, as it were, a complete, absolute and independent reality in themselves” (45–46, 47). Once we appreciate the crucial distinction between extension and matter/ body, we can no longer say with Descartes that the quantity of motion in the universe remains constant. Instead, as Newton argues in Query 31 of the second edition of Opticks (1718), “motion is much more apt to be lost than got, and [is] … always upon the decay.” Newton makes clear here that Descartes’ conservation principle leads to materialism because motion never needs to be recruited; its eternal operations are written into the system from the start and perpetuated body to body by the first law of nature. As against Descartes’ law, Query 31 specifies that what the Principia first termed the vis inertiae of bodies

is a passive principle by which bodies persist in their motion or rest, receive motion in proportion to the force impressing it, and resist as much as they are resisted. By this principle alone there never could have been any motion in the world. Some other principle was necessary for putting bodies into motion; and now [that] they are in motion, some other principle is necessary for conserving the motion.35

By negating the ambiguous insinuation in Descartes’ first law that one body moves another from eternity to infinity, Newton suggests that unlike his concept of vis inertiae, Descartes’ law was not a “passive principle,” that indeed it was worryingly sufficient of itself to explain the continuity of motion in the cosmos. Newton’s popularizers supported him in this inter- vention. From Newton, it was argued, we can be certain that matter’s “pas- sive nature, or inertia” ensures that bodies “never move of themselves” and that if they appear to do so “we immediately conclude that this is owing to some invisible agent” (Maclaurin 1748, 97).36 Newton offers protection from the “impious consequences” of Descartes. Who’s Afraid of Inertia? 27 The fact that Newton chooses to deploy the Latin word inertiae (denot- ing want of art or skill; inactivity) to characterize matter suggests that he sought to activate the term’s semantic associations with passivity as further ballast against any perceived connection between his principles of motion and Descartes’ controversial first law of nature. Yet Newton’s initial pres- entation of vis inertiae in the Principia is much closer to Descartes’ first law than his adoption of the term “inertia” (and its later explication in Query 31 of Opticks) leads us to expect. As it turns out, Descartes’ first law has long been seen as a crucial influence on Newton’s formulation of inertia, despite the fact that Newton never acknowledged the debt.37 What is more, multiple Newton scholars have argued that the Principian concept of vis inertiae, like Descartes’ first law, paradoxically disclaims matter’s inactivity just as it appears to establish it as a law of nature. In Definition III, Newton writes:

The vis insita, or innate force of matter, is a power of resisting, by which every body, as much as in it lies, continues in its present state, whether it be of rest, or of moving uniformly forwards in a right line…. A body, from the inert nature of matter, is not without difficulty put out of its state of rest or motion. Upon which account, this vis insita may, by a most significant name, be called inertia (vis inertiae) or force of inactivity.38

To call the inertia of matter a “vis insita” or an “innate force” already invites questions, as Ernan McMullin points out, about the attribution of something called “force” to a purportedly inert matter. To complicate mat- ters further, this innate force of matter is to be understood as “a power of resisting,” a formulation that adds to the confusion about matter’s ostensi- ble passivity. Newton’s paradoxical paraphrase of inertia as the “force of inactivity,” or what Westfall (1971) memorably calls “the ertness of inert- ness,” only exacerbates the confusion, recalling the Cartesian view of matter as somehow at once inert and active, passive and resistant (450).39 How do we understand this change in Newton’s accounts of inertia between 1687 and 1718? One possible clue is the theological establishment’s increasing embrace of Newton’s physics and its reinforcement of the distinc- tion between Newtonian vis inertiae and the Cartesian first law of nature. Newton’s anti-Cartesian distinction between extension or space and body and his related rejection of a plenum in favor of a vacuum form the bulwark of Richard Bentley’s inaugural “Boyle Lectures” against atheism, delivered in 1692–93 and later collected and printed several times throughout the early eighteenth century. Like More and Cudworth before him, Bentley was especially keen on defending the necessity of a spiritual, supernatu- ral force at play in the natural world, and he skillfully wielded Newton’s authority to dispense with Descartes and reassert matter’s passive nature. For Bentley, once Newton makes clear, contra Descartes, that “body and 28 Ellenzweig space or distance are quite different things, and that a vacuity is interspersed among all the matter of the universe,” we know decisively that matter is not “infinite” and “boundless” but “solitary,” “sluggish,” and “dependent.”40 Debunking Descartes’ infinite extension thus makes the eternity of motion and the threat of matter’s immanent activity a physical impossibility. To dispense with the Cartesian plenum is also to enable More’s sanitized ver- sion of the first law of nature; like More, Bentley links the assumed inactivity of matter with “its inability to change its present state either of moving or resting.”41 Newton’s contention in Query 31 that the vis inertiae assumes the opera- tion of “passive laws of motion” thus sounds more like Bentley and More than like his own account of inertia in the Principia. This shift in emphasis suggests Newton’s awareness of the potentially radical ontological implica- tions of his physics and his desire to tamp down any hint of materialism in conformity to orthodox expectations. There is evidence of both in a series of letters exchanged with Bentley in 1692–93, in which Newton anxiously defends his belief that matter is “inanimate” and “brute,” and asks Bentley not to ascribe to him the “Epicurean” view that gravity inheres as a natu- ral force in matter (Newton 2014, 136, 126). Yet it was the appearance in 1704 of John Toland’s Letters to Serena that was most pivotal in mov- ing Newton even more decisively in line with establishment mandates, as Toland’s fifth letter brazenly celebrated the author of the Principia for his belief that matter was self-moving.42 Insinuating a cannily heterodox read- ing of Newton’s explanation of inertia from Principia, in which Newton had claimed that “motion and rest, as commonly conceived, are only relatively distinguished,” Toland (2013) pronounced that

[t]hose who think the most truly and nicely therefore on local motion, consider the points from which and to which the body moves, not as in absolute repose, but only as quiescent with respect to the motion of that body: and though Mr Newton be deemed an advocate for extended incorporeal space, yet he declares that perhaps no one body is in absolute rest, that perhaps no immoveable bodily centre is to be found in nature. (144)

For Toland, by relativizing the conventionally assumed opposition between motion and rest, Newton’s principle of inertia, like his law of gravity, exposes the force within all bodies, irrespective of their state. In exposing this force, and its negation of absolute rest, Toland undoes the theological rationale for Newton’s separation of space and matter, for Toland’s Newton suggests that motion is eternal and thus autonomous of any extra-material cause. Once Newton instructs us in matter’s essential activity, Toland argues, we no longer “need to help it to motion” by the “invention” of an incor- poreal space in which an incorporeal cause presides. Toland ingeniously wields Newton against himself here, suggesting that the implications of his Who’s Afraid of Inertia? 29 physics disprove his separation of space and matter: “I am not insensible,” he adds, “that in this particular article of space I am said to have the great- est man in the world against me.” Newton’s stated supposition of a fictive space thus matters little, for with Toland’s help, “the demonstrations and discoveries of [Newton’s] unparalleled book remain entirely true without it” (Toland 2013, 137). Most important, Toland’s emphasis on the materialist implications of relativizing motion and rest brings Newton back in shad- owy association with Descartes, for it was just this transforming of rest into “something positive” that More found impossible to swallow in Cartesian mechanics, insisting in his final letter to Descartes that such a supposition grants to matter an “eternal force,” and thus destroys the reality of rest, ceding it forever to its motive “opposite.”43 That Toland’s materialist version of Newton is relatively unknown bespeaks the success of the physico-theology of such science-friendly theo- logians as More, Cudworth, and Bentley, a tradition that continued in the countless popularizations of Newtonianism into the eighteenth century.44 The pressure of this policed Newtonianism likely contributed to Newton’s decision not to add the intended note distinguishing his notion of vis inertiae from Kepler’s inertia in the second edition of Principia, published in 1713 and overseen, significantly, by Bentley. As his comment in Query 31 implies, all the better over the long run for his contemporaries to misunderstand his innovation, especially if this misunderstanding continues to separate him from Descartes. (The 1713 edition of Principia also included a new anti- Cartesian preface by Roger Cotes that reinforced this separation.) In the wake of Query 31, commentators like Colin Maclaurin, George Cheyne, Henry Pemberton, and Richard Glover buttressed this aim, all presenting Newton’s vis inertiae as a passive principle signifying matter’s “indifference” to rest or motion. In their redactions, inertia is meant to prove, as Pemberton and Glover put it, that matter “is not endowed with Self-motion, nor with a Power to alter the Course in which it is put” (Pemberton and Glover 1728, 10). Although it is true that their explications are not entirely wrong, they are also not entirely right, as they reduce the ontological ambiguity and complexity present in the original text of Principia, just as did More with Descartes’ Principles. While it is indeed the case that the theory of inertia shows matter to be passive in the sense that it can’t alter its course of motion or rest of its own accord, this apparent passivity is belied in the same theory by matter’s stated resistance to change, and, most powerfully, by motion’s tendency to persist indefinitely.45 Despite their best efforts, inertia’s popularizers can’t quite get around this fundamental tension and the careful reader senses their anxiety. Maclaurin (1748) admits that it is matter’s tendency to persevere in a state of rest that “suggests to us the passive nature of body”; matter’s persistence in its state of motion “is not altogether so obvious” (112). Like More before them, Pemberton and Glover (1728) tackled the problem of motion’s per- sistence by constantly reminding their readers that anything in motion has 30 Ellenzweig been set going by a “moving power” that is separate from body itself. Yet while the continuance of motion is thus “caused only by the body’s having already moved,” a worry still remains about “whether this motion com- municated continues intire, after the power, that caused it, ceases to act” (Pemberton and Glover 1728, 32). Descartes had thrown down the gauntlet when he insinuated in The World that a stone thrown could continue to move forever. Seen from a fuller perspective, both Descartes’ and Newton’s accounts of the persistence of motion serve to illustrate that ideological distortions aside, the matter of the Cartesian–Newtonian legacy was not passive in any abso- lute sense. When Spinoza claims in his Ethics that all things exhibit conatus, an effort or striving to persevere in their being, a view that famously assumes the inherent activity of matter, he shows his debt to the latent implication in the principle of inertia, an implication going back through Newton and Descartes, that matter’s tendency to persevere in the same state results from some motive principle in matter as such.46 If, as André Lecrivain (1986) argues, inertia can be understood “as the extreme limit of conatus,” some- thing like its “exhausted forms,” the reverse, as Spinoza seemed to discern, is equally true: conatus is the extension or flowering of inertia. Indeed, one could argue that one of the fundamental contributions of materialism, from Lucretius to La Mettrie and Diderot, was to articulate how life emerges from “the slightest principle of movement,” what Bergson (1998) describes as “the habits of inert matter … draw[n] … little by little … to another track” (Lecrivain 1986, 48; Bergson 1998, 98). For Bergson (1998), this movement from inertia to activity succeeds “by dint of humility,” an observation that implies a useful caution against the potential risks of understanding vitality in dichotomous opposition to pas- sivity and of overstating the vitality of matter (98). New materialists are suspicious of Enlightenment science for codifying laws of nature, an impulse that would seem on their view to be linked with the tendency to see nature as passively subjugated to an exclusively human claim to agency. Yet we need also to remember that these same suspect laws of nature were at the heart of the first materialist challenges to supernaturalism, challenges that proceeded not by exaggerating the creativity, productivity, and transforma- tive powers of nature but by acknowledging the limits of nature’s power.47 In this sense, the old materialism, in contrast to the new, was far less sanguine about the agential capacities of the material world (human and non-human alike), far less caught up in what Soran Reader (2007) has termed the “agen- tial bias” and its fear of that which is passive, patient, or constrained by limited degrees of freedom (580).48 Consider the locus classicus for modern materialism, Lucretius’ ancient Epicurean poem De Rerum Natura. For Lucretius, although the universe and all things in it face constant change, a world seen to be characterized by unlimited dynamism is, it turns out, a world in which men abdicate respon- sibility for true natural explanation, taking intellectual refuge in the Gods Who’s Afraid of Inertia? 31 and in other occult powers.49 The replacement of supernaturalism with materialism, Lucretius (2008) insists, depends on the lesson that everything is not possible in nature, a point repeated as a refrain in his text: “Each thing has a power that’s limited, and deep-set boundary stone.”50

Do not imagine that atoms of every kind Can be linked in every sort of combination. If that were so, then monsters everywhere You’ld see, things springing up half-man, half-beast, Tall branches sprouting from a living body, Limbs of land animals joined with those of sea. Chimaeras breathing flame from hideous mouths Nature would feed throughout the fertile earth, Too fertile, generating everything. That these things do not happen is manifest. … All this, for sure, fixed laws of nature govern. (2.700–710)

This same emphasis on the limits of nature’s powers resurfaces in Lucretius’ infamous account of the “swerve,” that barely perceptible change in motion that prevents atoms from descending invariably in a straight line and explains how atoms collide to form the stuff of the world: the “atoms must/Swerve slightly, just the very least—no more—/ Or we shall find our- selves imagining/ A sideways movement, which the facts refute” (Lucretius 2008, 2.243–45). The swerve thus signals both the dynamism inherent in matter—its creative capacity—and the reminder that this power is not unlimited.51 It should not be a surprise to discover that the ambiguity around activity and inactivity in Descartes’ first law and Newton’s vis inertiae tracks back to Lucretius, that the theory of inertia is bound up with the ghost of Epicurean materialism. In a fascinating set of articles, Bernard Cohen maps the modern concept of inertia back from Newton, to Descartes, to Lucretius by tracking the appearance of the Latin phrase “quantum in seest” [as much as it can/as much as in it lies] across each of their formulations of the concept.

Descartes: Each and every thing, [quantum in se est] in so far as it can, always continues in the same state; and thus what is once in motion always continues to move.

Newton: [E]very body, [quantum in se est] as much as in it lies, continues in its present state, whether it be of rest, or of moving uniformly forwards in a right line.52 32 Ellenzweig Lucretius repeats this somewhat awkward and ambiguous phrase, quantum in se est, four times in his explanation of the natural motion of the first things. “And yet I think we have no doubt,” he explains, “that all of them/ [as far as in them lies] would move downwards through the void” (Lucretius 2008, 201–202).53 What is the significance of this odd and insistent phrase? Used to qualify the motion in question, the phrase quantum in se est has proved notoriously difficult to translate. On the one hand, it signals what a body can do naturally, by its own force (though it may not be much), apart from external aid.54 On the other hand, it conveys a body’s tendency to resist change (however limited this resistance might be). Upon closer exami- nation, though, we see that the two senses of the phrase in fact inform each another, for they both emphasize, if from opposing angles, the elemental powers of a body. One might want to say, indeed, that a body’s capacity to oppose change grows out of a prior potential to do for itself in the first place, for “in each dwells its distinctive power” (Lucretius 2008, 1.172). As might be expected, the phrase’s final appearance qualifies the swerve:

For it is plain and manifest that weights When falling from above, [as far as in them lies], So far as meets the eye cannot move sideways. But whose eye can perceive that nothing swerves Ever so slightly from its straight course down?55

The swerve is a naturalist account of how creation happens in a world with- out God. It is indeed perhaps one of the more intriguing paradoxes of the poem that the swerve, the collapse of a body’s capacity to resist changes of state, accounts for nature’s capacity to generate life.56 For Lucretius, then, quantum in se est is tied up with his naturalism and his rejection of divine causes. If you accept the principles of his physics, “you’ll see at once/ That nature is free, no slave to masters proud;/ That nature by herself all things performs/ By her own will without the aid of gods” (Lucretius 2008, 2.1090–3). In adopting Lucretius’ terminology in their physics, Descartes and Newton remind us of the intricacy of materialism’s often hidden legacy.57 They remind us that bodies that may seem inert may not in fact be wholly so. In our efforts to theorize new materialist ontologies in relation to what came before, we need to be better attuned to the nuances of seventeenth- century mechanism and attentive to both the insights and the distortions of such readers as More, Cudworth, Bentley, and Maclaurin. Once we register the ways that passive and active matter exist more on a continuum than in dichotomous opposition in Descartes and Newton, we can better appreci- ate that what they gave to modernity was less a crude insistence on matter’s passivity than a new and potentially radical primacy to the phenomenon of motion. Whereas for the Aristotelian physicist continued motion was something that required explication, beginning with Descartes and his Who’s Afraid of Inertia? 33 contemporaries, it was a given (Garber 1982, 225). This reversal from a system that orients around rest to one that orients around motion represents a fundamental watershed in the history of thinking about matter—Žižek (2014) counts it as an “event,” “a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it”—and it was a crucial component of modern materialism. It was Descartes’ transformative innovation, Garber explains, to see that motion was not a passage from one state of rest to another, but “itself a state of body, a mode of body” (Žižek 2014, 11–12; Garber 1982, 196).58 Perhaps most importantly for this volume, materialism’s often hidden legacy also makes an implicit case for secular naturalism; if matter has pow- ers of activity, these powers are not spiritual, “occult,” uncanny, enchanted, or God-given in any theological or magical senses.59 Matter’s powers form part of the definition of what nature is on its own grounds. There is an irony in this legacy vis à vis new materialism’s histories: while it is fair to say that Descartes’ universe was a kind of extraordinary machine and thus in a certain sense lacking in ontological depth, at the same time it was the austerity of his mechanism that was perceived to lead to materialism, appearing to release matter from any supernatural control. Newton’s contrasting emphasis on matter’s “active principles”—its “powers, virtues or forces”—was seen by most, on the contrary, to preserve God’s shaping hand in his creation far bet- ter.60 What’s more, Newton wanted nothing more than to square his physics with the theology of his day. Though his theory of vis inertiae, as I have argued, did not require the level of physico-theological investment that he came to give it, he worked hard to insist that it was necessary. Without a con- vincing explanation for why matter’s mechanical processes required immate- rial powers to undergird them, mechanism in its Cartesian guise could not help but sideline God, implying even despite itself that matter was perhaps autonomous, that some implicit degree of dynamism was essential to it as a substance. New materialism embraces a post-secular openness to “enchant- ment” as part of its critique of neo-liberal politics, but from Lucretius to Deleuze, materialism has long staked its claim on its naturalistic account of the universe. We need to think carefully when celebrating vital matter about whether we risk reinvoking a kind of occult enchantment that may well trivi- alize and obfuscate the very Nature we intend to preserve and empower.61 As I hope to have shown, the histories of mechanism and materialism are richly intertwined in the early modern period. New materialism thus gets little traction from establishing a starkly dichotomous opposition between passive and active matter. It remains, for example, an open (and fascinating) question whether Spinoza’s version of materialism, his belief that motion is inseparable from the one substance that is extension, repudiates Descartes’ physics or rather extends its implicit premises. One could argue that in his radicalization of Cartesianism, Spinoza, like More and Cudworth, suggests that the underlying implications of Descartes’ physics might give the lie to the supposition that matter is inert.62 Denigrating Descartes for a passive 34 Ellenzweig conception of matter, new materialism celebrates Spinoza as a key early modern inspiration for its alternative ontology, yet the contrast it erects between the two thinkers is just one piece of a complex story of assimila- tion and negation, influence and reformulation.63 As Deleuze (1992) astutely observes, if “the Anticartesian reaction … re-establish[es] the claims of a Nature endowed with forces or power,” it does so by “retaining the chief discovery of Cartesian mechanism” (228).

Notes 1 For other examples of grouping Descartes and Newton into a unified legacy, see Barad 2007, 97, 138; Haynes 2014, 132–33. Jane Bennett (2010) claims that “the idea of matter as passive stuff” is an idea that “runs fast through modern heads,” yet she fails to identify this idea with any particular thinker or set of thinkers (see Bennett 2010, vii; also xiii). Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (2012) establish their new materialism as a philosophy committed to “breaking through dualism,” yet like Bennett they neglect to specify the contours of the tradition to which they oppose themselves (97, 115–36). For new materialism’s account of lively matter, see esp. Coole and Frost 2010, 7–10; Bennett 2010, vii–xvi. 2 On the problem of supersessionist accounts of historical change, see Smail 2011; Cole 2015. 3 On Kepler, see Daniel Garber 1982, 253; Cohen 2002, 61; Rosen 1966, 612–13. 4 Descartes to Mersenne, December 1638, cited in Garber 1982, 253; Cohen 1978, 27; Cohen 1964, 42. 5 See Gabbey 2008; Henry 1993. 6 See Sara Ahmed (2008) for a similar concern that the new materialism “almost seems to return to old binaries” (34). 7 Coole, “The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh” (Coole and Frost 2010, 94). On the view that the principle of inertia was a kind of revolution- ary, modern watershed in the history of science, see Butterfield 1965, 18–19; Henry 2004, 111; Garber 1982, 195–96. See also Susan James’ (1997) con- tention that proponents of the view that matter is active sometimes promote a caricatured picture of mechanism’s conception of passive, inert matter, one that fails to account for the active powers that at least some mechanists do attribute to bodies (80). 8 The new wave of Descartes scholarship in philosophy circles has increasingly suggested that on more careful reading, Cartesian dualism tends to suggest a more complex doctrine of mind-body union. For a summary of recent revisionist work in this area see Gobert 2013, 5. Catherine Wilson (2008) points out that “it is not often noticed that [Descartes’] Meditations were equally concerned with the possibility that our ideas of incorporeal things have a source that is corpo- real” (115); see also Wilson 2005. 9 Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1984, 2:17). 10 Descartes, The World, chapter 6 (1984, 1:91). 11 Descartes, Principles, 2.4 (1984, 1:224); see also Principles, 2.1 (1984, 1:223) and Principles, 2.16 (1984, 1:229–30). 12 As John Cottingham (1997) argues, “Later Cartesians may have insisted that extended stuff was wholly passive and inert, requiring God to move it; but Descartes himself seems to have been comfortable attributing causal powers to objects” (164). On the tensions between Cartesian dualism and Cartesian sci- ence, see also Cottingham 1992. Who’s Afraid of Inertia? 35 13 Descartes, Principles, 2.36 (1984, 1:240); also The World, chapter 7 (1984, 1:96); see Garber 1982, 265. 14 See also Richard Burthogge (1694) on the confounding of God and Nature in Descartes and the need for a philosophy that will more properly “show how God, how Nature does operate, and how they differ” (259). Though today Descartes tends to be seen to devalue nature by taking away its immanent powers, contempo- raries saw the implications of his physics very differently. As Garber (1982) explains, the laws of nature for Descartes are not formulated by God and then imposed on an inert nature, as seventeenth-century physico-theology would have it. Rather, mat- ter’s motions “follow directly out of the way the God who exists with the nature he has causes motion in the world he first created and now sustains” (274). 15 See Descartes, The World, chapter 3 (1984, 1:85). 16 Lettre de M. Morus à M. Descartes, Cambridge, 11 décembre 1648 (Lewis 1953, 99). 17 On the significance of the history of the term “Cartesianism” as coined by More, see Gabbey 1982, esp. 174. On the view that Cartesianism led to materialism, see Vartanian 1953, esp. 3–46. On More’s critique of Cartesianism, see Gabbey 1990, 27–28; Gabbey 1982; Jesseph 2005, 205; Henry 2013. 18 See also More 1987, book 2, chapter 11, 144–45 and chapter 12, 146. On More’s defense of passive matter, see Henry 2012; also Henry 1986, 356; Gabbey 1990, 27–28; Hall 2002; McGuire 1966, 226–28. 19 See Descartes, The World, chapter 4, chapters 6–7 (1984, 1:85–88, 1:90–93); Principles, 2.2, 2.5, 2.10, 2.11, 2.13, 2.21 (1984, 1:224, 1:225, 1:227, 1:227–28, 1:228, 1:232). 20 While Descartes was also committed to the role of incorporeal activity in the universe and indeed turned to God to undergird his physics, it is important to recognize that he was decidedly more comfortable with mechanical explanation than was More. For More, the support of religion was his main aim; philosophy was always secondary. One need not impute any irreligion to Descartes to argue that the same was not true for him. As Gabbey (1990) points out, “Descartes had disclaimed special or ‘professional’ competence in the domain of theology” (32); see also Funkenstein 1986, 3–22; Hall 2002, 149, 162; Henry 2004, 113. On the view that More’s theology drove his critique of Cartesianism, see also Jesseph 2005, 203. 21 See also Garber 2001, 202. Descartes merely says, “From God’s immutability we can also know certain rules or laws of nature, which are the secondary and particular causes of the various motions we see in particular bodies” (Principles, 2.37 [1984, 1:240–41]). In Garber’s (1982) words, “the argument would pro- ceed in exactly the same way if there were genuine immanent causes of motion in bodies” (287). Cudworth (1678) complains similarly that mechanism tends to suggest that its “General Laws … would all be as they are, though there were no God” (147). See also Henry 1986, 353–55; Israel 2001, 28; Cottingham 1997, 161, 163–64; Reid 2012, 249. Pascal (2010) famously commented, “I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dis- pense with God” (34). 22 Descartes, Principles, 2.37 (1984, 1:240–41). 23 More 1987, book. 1, chapter 11, 60. 24 On the counter-intuitive aspect of the principle that motion in and of itself per- sists, see Henry 2004, 111. Following Descartes, Hobbes (1968) also emphasizes the magnitude of the break from the scholastic emphasis on rest, allowing that while we can understand that a thing at rest will remain in rest unless something comes to “stirre it,” the flip side of the proposition, “that when a thing is in motion, it will eternally be in motion, unless somewhat els stay it, … is not so easily assented to” (87). What Hobbes implies but does not say is that the persis- 36 Ellenzweig tence of motion is perhaps met with resistance because, as More makes clear, it calls to mind the nagging problem of the origin of motion. 25 Réplique de M. Morus à M. Descartes, Cambridge, 5 mars 1649 (Lewis 1953, 153); Lettre de M. Morus à M. Descartes, Cambridge, 23 juillet 1649 (Lewis 1953, 177). 26 Descartes to More, August 1649 (Descartes 1970, 258). 27 See Henry 2012, 21. As James (1997) argues, inertia is among the phenomena that push back against mechanism’s purportedly passive view of matter. For both Descartes and Hobbes, on her view, a body’s effort to persist in its existing state of motion or rest means that bodies have an inherent power to resist change. Though this is not to say that bodies are fully active, they should be recognized to be so in a limited sense (75–81). 28 See Hall 2002, 164. 29 More 1987, book 1, chapter 11, 62. 30 Descartes, The World, chapter 7 (1984, 1:96); Principles, 2.36 (1984, 1:240). 31 See Leask 2012, 509; also Garber 1982, 203. 32 Descartes, Principles, 2.43 (1984, 1:243). 33 Descartes to Mersenne, 28 October 1640 (Descartes 1970, 79). Westfall 1971, 450; Leask 2012, 509. 34 Cudworth 1678, 54; also 148–49. 35 Newton (2014, 183, 182). 36 For Maclaurin (1748), Spinoza represents the blossoming of all that was worri- some and latent in Descartes (see 74–78, 85). 37 On Newton’s debt to Descartes for his principle of inertia, see Herviel 1965, 42–53; Koyré 1965, esp. 65–74; Cohen 1964b. 38 Newton 1934, definition 3, 2. 39 See Koyré’s (1965) comment that the Latin “perseverare” is badly translated as “continues” (66). Descartes uses the same Latin term, translated conventionally into English as “persists.” On the active connotations of Newton’s law of inertia, see also McGuire 1994, 307–11. Note Hume’s (1977) formulation of the para- dox of inertia in a footnote in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: “I need not examine at length the vis inertiae which is so much talked of in the new philosophy, and which is ascribed to matter … When we call this a vis iner- tiae, we only mark these facts, without pretending to have any idea of the inert power; in the same manner as, when we talk of gravity, we mean certain effects, without comprehending that active power, It was never the meaning of Sir ISAAC NEWTON to rob second causes of all force or energy; though some of his fol- lowers have endeavoured to establish that theory upon his authority … I must confess, that there is something in the fate of opinions a little extraordinary” (48–49, n. 32). 40 Bentley, A Confutation of Atheism from the Origin and Frame of the World (1838, 3:142–42). 41 Bentley, A Confutation of Atheism from the Origin and Frame of the World (1838, 3:168; also 3:156, 3:160). 42 For the view that Newton adapted the later editions of his Queries to Opticks in nervous reaction against Toland’s Letters to Serena, see Dobbs and Jacob 1995, 98; McGuinness 1996. On the political pressures on Newton to bow to a level of theo- logical orthodoxy to which he did not necessarily subscribe, see Schliesser 2013, 422, 424; Guerlac and Jacob 1969, 311–12. 43 Lettre de M. Morus à M. Descartes, Cambridge, 23 juillet 1649 (Lewis 1953, 179). 44 Bentley’s successor in the Boyle Lectures, Samuel Clarke, also contributed impor- tantly to protecting and defending Newtonian science against the heterodox appropriations of Toland and other radicals. Who’s Afraid of Inertia? 37 45 As Kepler’s earlier, more literal version of inertia taught, matter in motion did stop and achieve rest; truly passive, Keplerian matter did not resist change and its motion did not continue. 46 See Spinoza, Ethics, III, p. 6 (2002, 283). For the linked relationship between the conatus principle and the principle of inertia, see Curley 1973, 367–69; Lecrivain 1986, 45–48. Contrary to the view that the logical endpoint of the Cartesian and Newtonian concepts of inertia is conatus, Nietzsche (1968) argued that Spinoza’s conatus principle was itself too passive, taking us back to something like inertia as conventionally conceived: “Spinoza’s law of ‘self-preservation’ ought really to put a stop to change: but this law is false, the opposite is true. It can be shown most clearly that every living thing does everything it can not to preserve itself but to become more—” (367). 47 For the stark opposition in new materialism between matter’s inertia and its dynamism, see for example Coole and Frost 2010, 13; Bennett 2010, 77. Bennett takes issue with Bergson’s view that matter exhibits a preference for inertia yet I would point out that one of Bergson’s contributions is to undermine any simple opposition between inertia and activity in the first place; “there is no essential dif- ference,” he observes, “between passing from one state to another and persisting in the same state” (Bergson 1998, 2). 48 Despite its commitment to a posthumanist critique of human exceptionalism, new materialism’s extension of agency to the nonhuman world tends to fall prey to an unintended anthropocentrism just where it attempts to repudiate it, for as Patrice Haynes (2014) argues, nature and the material world merely “mirror the humanist model of personhood, with its agential understanding of persons.” Perhaps a richer posthumanist paradigm, she suggests, would be one that dared to let go of and see beyond the human fantasy of agential capacity in the first place (132). For similar critiques of new materialist theories of agency, see also Braun 2008, 670; Colebrook 2008, 59; Mel Chen’s (2016) contribution to “A Questionnaire on Materialisms.” 49 See Lucretius 2008, 1.62–79. Note also Lucretius’ related caution against man’s infinite appetite for pleasure, an appetite that plagues him with a fear of death. For Lucretius, then, the wise materialist understands the principle of restraint in nature. Though “all things move on” (5.830), at the same time, “we live and move and have our being/ In the same place always, and no new pleasure/ By liv- ing longer can be hammered out” (3.1079–81). 50 Lucretius 2008, 1.77–78; 1.594–95; 1.790–93; 2.751–54. 51 For Lucretius (2008), the dynamism inherent in matter, expressed by the swerve, explains our capacity for free will and agency:

Though many men are driven By an external force, compelled to move Often in headlong rush against their will, Yet in our breasts there’s something that has the power To fight against this force and to resist it. … The same thing therefore we must admit in atoms: That in addition to their weights and impacts There is another separate cause of motion, From which we get this innate power of ours, Since nothing ever can be produced from nothing (2.277–88).

52 Descartes, Principles, 2.37 (1984, 1:240); Newton 1934, definition 3, 2. 38 Ellenzweig 53 Melville (Lucretius 2008) translates quantum in se est as “left to themselves.” I here follow the more literal Loeb translation of W. H. D. Rouse (Lucretius 1992). For an analysis of the profound significance of this phrase for the history of sci- ence, see Cohen 1964a; Cohen 1964b; Hine 1995. 54 Denys Lambin (Lambinus), sixteenth-century professor of Greek at the Sorbonne, considered the phrase quantum in se est to mean sponte sua, “by itself unaided.” Cyril Bailey’s authoritative modern edition for Clarendon Press concurs with this early translation (Cohen 1964b, 144, 147). 55 Lucretius 2008, 2.246–50 (here too my translation is informed by Rouse [Lucretius 1992]). 56 Indeed, Lucretius does not hesitate to assert that it is the various combinations, groupings, and mixtures of the first bodies (made possible by the swerve) that account for all the variety of things in the universe. See, for example, Lucretius 2008, 1.628–34; 1.675–79; 1.814–22; 1.894–95. 57 Newton’s manuscripts show that in the early 1690s, while at work on revi- sions towards the second edition of Principia, he considered including several extended excerpts from Lucretius’ De rerum natura, excerpts that include ref- erences to quantum in se est. It is likely not a coincidence that he abandoned this project right around the time of his correspondence with Bentley, who was responsible for the production of the new edition (Cohen 1964b, 146–47; see Hine 1995, 728). 58 For the Aristotelians, a body in motion is moved by something other than itself, and once these causes—efficient, formal, and final—cease to operate, motion stops. Descartes challenges the Aristotelian tradition thus: “Finally, the motion of which they speak has a very strange nature; for whereas all other things have their perfection as an end and strive only to preserve themselves, it has no other end and no other goal than rest and, contrary to all the laws of nature, it strives of its own accord to destroy itself. By contrast, the motion which I posit follows the same laws of nature as do generally all the dispositions and qualities found in matter” (Descartes, The World, chapter 7 [1984, 1:94]; see also Principles, 2.37 [1984, 1:241]). 59 On the debate over occult forces in the seventeenth century, see Hutchison 1982. 60 Newton 2014, 179, 184–5; Newton to Bentley, Cambridge, 25 February 1692/93 (2014, 136). 61 For a useful survey of naturalism in the early modern period, see LoLordo 2011. For a bracing critique of recently fashionable enchantment narratives, see Robbins 2011. Robbins warns astutely against the kinds of dichotomous oppo- sitions between past and present that I am arguing new materialism and other presentist theories uphold. Instead of positing a misleading “before” and “after,” Robbins suggests, we may instead want to consider the “persistence of the kinds of dilemmas society had suffered through before, however different the dilemmas themselves or the form they take” (83). 62 For the view that Descartes laid the foundations for Spinoza, see for example Leibniz’s comment that “there are many people to whom Descartes appears to be of the same opinion [as Spinoza]. Certainly, he made himself very suspect by rejecting the search for final causes” (Leibniz 1989, 282). See also Bayle’s (1734) similar observation that “there is ground to believe that the ill use [Spinoza] made of some maxims of [Descartes] occasioned his Atheism” (206). As Jonathan Israel (2007) contends, “by far the most important factor shaping Spinoza’s lan- guage, terminology, and way of formulating his ideas, undoubtedly, was … his intense, tangled relationship with Cartesianism.” Spinoza both “build[s] on and yet negate[s] Descartes” (47, 53). See also W. N. A. Klever (1988) for the simi- larly nuanced view that “Spinoza does not reject completely” Descartes’ defini- Who’s Afraid of Inertia? 39 tion of matter through extension, adapting it rather to express God’s infinite activity so that God’s power is identified with matter (168). For other accounts of Spinoza’s complex relationship to Cartesianism in the secondary literature, see Israel 2001, 245–46, 250–52; Lecrivain 1986; Nelson 2014. 63 To add to this complexity, Deleuze (1992) interestingly notes that for Leibniz, Spinoza’s theory of modes actually deprives matter of its activity and dyna- mism. In this reversed sense, Descartes’ “inert passive Extension” was indeed “the father of Spinozism” (226). Toland (2013) protested similarly that Spinoza’s matter theory was too barren and in this sense too close to Descartes’ (115–28).

References Ahmed, Sara. 2008. “Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the ‘New Materialism.’” European Journal of Women’s Studies 15 (1): 23–39. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bayle, Peter. 1734. The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle. 2nd ed. London. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bentley, Richard. 1838. A Confutation of Atheism from the Origin and Frame of the World, The Works of Richard Bentley. 3 vols. Edited by Alexander Dyce. London. Bergson, Henri. 1998. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Mineola, NY: Dover. Braun, Bruce. 2008. “Environmental Issues: Inventive Life.” Progress in Human Geography 32 (5): 667–79. Burthogge, Richard. 1694. An Essay upon Reason and the Nature of Spirits. London. Butterfield, Herbert. 1965. The Origins of Modern Science 1300–1800. Rev. ed. New York: Free Press. Chen, Mel Y. 2016. Contribution to “A Questionnaire on Materialisms.” October 155: 21–22. Cohen, I. Bernard. 1964a. “Quantum in Se Est: Newton, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and Lucretius.” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 38: 36–46. Cohen, I. Bernhard. 1964b. “Quantum in Se Est: Newton’s Concept of Inertia in Relation to Descartes and Lucretius.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. 19 (2): 131–55. Cohen, I. Bernard. 1978. Introduction to Newton’s Principia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cohen, I. Bernard. 1999. A Guide to Newton’s Principia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cohen, I. Bernard. 2002. “Newton’s Concepts of Force and Mass, with Notes on the Laws of Motion.” In The Cambridge Companion to Newton, edited by Cohen and George E. Smith, 57–84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cole, Andrew. 2015. “The Function of Theory at the Present Time.” PMLA 130 (3): 809–18. 40 Ellenzweig Colebrook, Claire. 2008. “On Not Becoming Man: The Materialist Politics of Unactualized Potential.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 52–84. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cottingham, John. 1992. “Cartesian Dualism: Theology, Metaphysics, and Science.” In The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, edited by Cottingham, 236–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cottingham, John. 1997. “Force, Motion and Causality: More’s Critique of Descartes.” In The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context: Politics, Metaphysics, and Religion, edited by G. A. Rogers, J. M. Vienne, and Yves Charles Zarka, 159–71. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Cudworth, Ralph. 1678. A True Intellectual System of the Universe. London. Curley, E.M. 1973. “Spinoza’s Moral Philosophy.” In Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Marjorie Grene, 354–76. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Zone Books. Descartes, René. 1970. Descartes: Philosophical Letters. Edited by Anthony Kenny. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Descartes, René. 1984. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. 2 vols. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dobbs, Betty Jo Teeter and Margaret C. Jacob. 1995. Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Dolphijn, Rick and Iris van der Tuin, eds. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Funkenstein, Amos. 1986. Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gabbey, Alan. 1982. “Philosophia Cartesiana Trimphata: Henry More (1646– 1671).” In Problems of Cartesianism, edited by N. Davis and T. Lennon, 171– 250. Toronto: McGill-Queens University Press. Gabbey, Alan. 1990. “Henry More and the Limits of Mechanism.” In Henry More (1614–1687): Tercentenary Studies, edited by Sarah Hutton, 19–36. Boston: Kluwer. Gabbey, Alan. 2008. “Cudworth, More, and the Mechanical Analogy.” In Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England, 1640–1700, edited by Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft, and Perez Zagorin, 109–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garber, Daniel. 1982. Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Garber, Daniel. 2001. Descartes Embodied: Reading Cartesian Philosophy through Cartesian Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gobert, R. Darren. 2013. The Mind-Body Stage: Passion and Interaction in the Cartesian Theater. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Guerlac, Henry, and M. C. Jacob. 1969. “Bentley, Newton, and Providence: The Boyle Lectures Once More.” Journal of the History of Ideas 30 (3): 307–18. Hall, A. Rupert. 2002. “More and Descartes.” In Henry More and the Scientific Revolution, 2nd ed., 146–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Who’s Afraid of Inertia? 41 Haynes, Patrice. 2014. “Creative Becoming and the Patiency of Matter: Feminism, New Materialism and Theology.” Angelaki 19 (1): 129–50. Henry, John. 1986. “Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy: Active Principles in Pre-Newtonian Matter Theory.” History of Science 24: 335–81. Henry, John. 1993. “Henry More and Newton’s Gravity.” History of Science 31 (1): 83–97. Henry, John. 2004. “Metaphysics and the Origins of Modern Science: Descartes and the Importance of Laws of Nature.” Early Science and Medicine 9 (2): 73–114. Henry, John. 2012. “Henry More.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available online at: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/henry- more/ Henry, John. 2013. “The Reception of Cartesianism.” In Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century, edited by Peter Anstey, 116–43. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herviel, John. 1965. The Background to Newton’s Principia. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hine, William L. 1995. “Inertia and Scientific Law in Sixteenth-Century Commentaries on Lucretius.” Renaissance Quarterly 48 (4): 728–41. Hobbes, Thomas. 1968. Leviathan. Edited by C. B. Macpherson. London: Penguin. Hume, David. 1977. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Eric Steinberg. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Hutchison, Keith. 1982. “What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution?” Isis 73 (2): 233–53. Israel, Jonathan. 2001. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Israel, Jonathan. 2007. “Spinoza as an Expounder, Critic, and ‘Reformer’ of Descartes.” Intellectual History Review 17 (1): 59–78. James, Susan. 1997. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jesseph, Douglas. 2005. “Mechanism, Skepticism, and Witchcraft: More and Glanvill on the Failures of the Cartesian Philosophy.” In Receptions of Descartes: Cartesiansim and Anti-Cartesianism in Early Modern Europe, edited by Tad M. Schmaltz, 199–217. New York: Routledge. Klever, W. N. A. 1988. “Moles In Motu: Principles of Spinoza’s Physics.” Studia Spinozana 4: 165–94. Koyré, Alexandre. 1965. “Newton and Descartes.” Newtonian Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leask, Ian. 2012. “Unholy Force: Toland’s Leibnizian ‘Consummation’ of Spinozism.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20 (3): 499–537. Lecrivain, André. 1986. “Spinoza and Cartesian Mechanics.” In Spinoza and the Sciences, edited by Marjorie Grene and Debra Nails, 15–60. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1989. Philosophical Essays. Translated by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Lemke, Thomas. 2015. “Rethinking Biopolitics: The New Materialism and the Political Economy of Life.” In Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political, and Performative Strategies, edited by S.E. Wilmer and Audronė Žukauskaitė, 57–73. New York: Routledge. Lewis, Geneviève, ed. 1953. Correspondence avec Arnaud et Morus. Paris: J. Vrin. 42 Ellenzweig LoLordo, Andrea. 2011. “Epicureanism and Early Modern Naturalism.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 19 (4): 647–64. Lucretius. 1992. De Rerum Natura. Translated by W. H. D. Rouse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lucretius. 2008. On the Nature of the Universe. Translated by Ronald Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maclaurin, Colin. 1748. An Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries. London. McGuinness, Philip. 1996. “‘The Hue and Cry of Heresy’: John Toland, Isaac Newton & the Social Context of Scientists.” History Ireland 4: 22–7. McGuire, J.E. 1966. “Body and Void and Newton’s De Mundi Systemate: Some New Sources.” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 3: 206–48. McGuire, J.E. 1994. “Natural Motion and Its Causes: Newton on the ‘Vis Insita’ of Bodies.” In Self-Motion from Aristotle to Newton, edited by Mary Louise Gill and James G. Lennox, 305–29. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. More, Henry. 1662. An Antidote against Atheism, A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings of Dr. Henry More. London. More, Henry. (1668) 1743. Divine Dialogues. London. More, Henry. 1987. The Immortality of the Soul. Edited by A. Jacob. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Nelson, Alan. 2014. “Descartes’ Dualism and Its Relation to Spinoza’s Metaphysics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Descartes’ Meditations, edited by David Cunning, 277–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Newton, Sir Isaac. 1934. Principia. Vol. 1. Translated by Andrew Motte and Florian Cajori. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Newton, Sir Isaac. 2014. Philosophical Writings. Edited by Andrew Janiak. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books. Pascal, Blaise. Thoughts. 1910. Translated by W. F. Trotter. New York: P. F. Collier & Son. Pemberton, Henry, and Richard Glover. 1728. A View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy. London. Reader, Soran. 2007. “The Other Side of Agency.” Philosophy 82 (4): 579–604. Reid, Jasper. 2012. The Metaphysics of Henry More. New York: Springer. Robbins, Bruce. 2011. “Enchantment? No, Thank You!” In The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now, edited by George Levine, 74–94. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rosen, Edward. 1966. “Kepler’s Harmonics and His Concept of Inertia.” American Journal of Physics 34 (7): 610–13. Schliesser, Eric. 2013. “On Reading Newton as an Epicurean: Kant, Spinozism and the Changes to the Principia.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 44: 416–28. Smail, Daniel Lord. 2011. “History and the Telescoping of Time: A Disciplinary Forum.” French Historical Studies 34 (1): 1–6. Spinoza, Baruch. 2002. Spinoza: Complete Works. Translated by Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Toland, John. 2013. Letters to Serena. Edited by Ian Leask. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Who’s Afraid of Inertia? 43 Vartanian, Aram. 1953. Diderot and Descartes: A Study of Scientific Naturalism in the Enlightenment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Westfall, Richard. 1971. Force in Newton’s Physics: The Science of Dynamics in the Seventeenth Century. New York: American Elsevier. Wilson, Catherine. 2005. “What Is the Importance of Descartes’s Meditation Six?” Philosophica 76: 67–90. Wilson, Catherine. 2008. Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2014. Event: A Philosophical Journey through a Concept. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House. 2 Varieties of Vital Materialism

Charles T. Wolfe Ghent University

All matter quick, and bursting into birth Alexander Pope, Essay on Man

A common misunderstanding concerning early modern and Enlightenment materialism is that it is in essence, or by definition, “mechanistic material- ism.” The latter term has often functioned as an ideological construct and as such has not always been well defined, but one can venture a general defini- tion as follows. Mechanistic materialism holds that the world is material, and what it is to be material, in this case, is to be exhaustively explainable in terms of shape, size, and motion, with a further possible reduction towards a mathematization of such a mechanistically construed matter (Dear 1995). Indeed, some prominent materialists such as Hobbes do seem to hold such a view: what is real is only matter and motion, and the only kind of substance that exists is body.1 Similarly, in the eighteenth century, some thinkers such as the Baron d’Holbach, and Diderot in a more physicalist mood, insist that “causes really are only of one kind ... : physical causes” given that “the uni- verse, this vast sum of all that exists, offers us everywhere just matter and motion”; “motion is a mode of being which necessarily follows from the essence of matter” (Diderot 1975–2004, 9:258).2 This more or less physi- calistic configuration of matter has further implications that lie outside the boundaries of this essay, such as the reduction of all causation to efficient causation, the rejection of teleology, and the promotion of physics as both science and source of an ontology (physicalism).3 As such, calls for a “new materialism” which would do justice to the reality of embodiment, to the historicity of the body, perhaps to a degree of agency implied in the possibility of self-construction—a kind of cyborg materialism, as it were—make sense, if juxtaposed with this construct of a mechanistic materialism, where the body is understood as being like a “statue or machine made of earth,” in Descartes’ celebrated phrase from L’Homme, or as a system of pulleys, funnels and sieves (Descartes, AT IX: 120). New-materialist calls to attend to materiality, experience, and self- construction seem convincing when contrasted with this “Cimmerian” vision of an early modern context in which, as Jonathan Sawday (1995) put Varieties of Vital Materialism 45 it, “As a machine, the body became objectified; a focus of intense ­curiosity, but entirely divorced from the world of the speaking and thinking subject” (29).4 But if we examine the reality of early modern materialism a bit more closely, the concept of mechanistic materialism falls apart, as do the his- torical claims justifying the pertinence of a new materialism opposed to this purportedly static and mechanistic older model, at least as regards its attempt to articulate an opposition between “old” and “new,” passive and active, inert and dynamic (e.g., the claim that “new materialist ontologies are abandoning the terminology of matter as an inert substance subject to pre- dictable causal forces” in Coole and Frost 2010, 9). Perhaps the canonical statement, not of mechanistic materialism by an advocate (say, Hobbes) but by a critic, prefiguring in that sense the criticisms to follow into the twenty- first century, was given by Friedrich Engels ([1888] 1982), well known to historians of materialism but perhaps less known to the new materialists (who might discover a hidden ancestor!):

The materialism of the past century was predominantly mechanistic, because at that time … only the science of mechanics … had reached any sort of completion …. For the materialists of the eighteenth cen- tury, man was a machine. This exclusive application of the standards of mechanics to processes of a chemical and organic nature … constitutes the specific (and at that time, inevitable) limitation of classical French materialism. (278)5

It seems as if Engels is the first new materialist; or that his mixture of nor- mative language and historical claims closely prefigures the supposedly “new” new materialist moment—and not in a good way, for his statement is multiply problematic. We are faced with two interpretive problems here: the concept of mechanistic materialism, and more broadly, the contents of “new” versus “old” (including purportedly mechanistic) materialism. For nothing prevents the contemporary theorist concerned with materiality, self- hood, and the body from calling their position “new materialism,” but the historiographic and indeed philosophical claims contained therein may turn out to be worth as much as the declarations by biologists that vitalism is a doctrine fit for cranks.6 In what sense does the notion of mechanistic materialism, including Engels’ historical proclamation, fall apart? At least three aspects should be distinguished. First of all, writers using the notion often curiously neglect the major meta­physical gap between mechanism, as represented for instance by Descartes, Galileo, and Boyle, and materialism. It is disconcerting to read new materialists equating Cartesian and Newtonian concepts of matter, sometimes even speaking of “The Cartesian–Newtonian understanding of matter” as “domination of Nature” or “older Cartesian–Newtonian con- ceptions of matter and correspondingly Promethean ideas of human mastery 46 Wolfe over nature” (Coole and Frost 2010, 8, 17), a project Newton would not have endorsed, as Ellenzweig discusses in her contribution to this volume; and matter in Descartes is, of course, inert (while the Newtonian addition of forces to matter, while it indeed renders matter non-inert, is neverthe- less a different creature from thinking, sensing, or otherwise vital matter). Philosophically speaking, the majority of early modern mechanists were either substance dualists or agnostic concerning the nature of a foundational “substance” such as matter. This seems both rather well known (although confusion persists) and unproblematic, so I will not dwell on it further. Second, those who wield the concept of mechanistic materialism neglect— in this participating in a broader tendency towards intellectual blindness or at least narrow-mindedness—the presence of a strong, explicit, and diverse concern with embodiment in various early modern materialists (as discussed in Wolfe 2012). This includes the common tendency to take works such as La Mettrie’s L’Homme-Machine literally: despite the (provocative) title of his work, La Mettrie never reduces the properties of the living body to the prop- erties of inanimate matter, or those of “machines”—which machines? and after all, weren’t Enlightenment automata all about a fascination with life? (Riskin 2003, Landes 2011, Wolfe 2013)—or the organic to the inorganic (Thomson 1989, Wolfe 2009). L’Homme-Machine is indeed a bold piece of reductionist argumentation, but as I discuss below, the reduction proposed therein is a soul-body reduction. In addition, it bears noting that “machine” in French usage of the period could often refer to the body!7 Granted, one should not insist on an absolute reversal of Engels’ view (i.e., claiming that all materialism was embodied and/or vital). For instance, a very different pic- ture emerges from work on early eighteenth-century German philosophy such as Paola Rumore’s (2016): in this context, materialism was indeed under- stood as an “unavoidable consequence of natural mechanism” rather than as an autonomous philosophical position. The problem that then emerges, for thinkers like Wolff (in the wake of Leibniz), is how to rescue mechanism from materialism, given that on their view, every form of materialism is mechanis- tic, but not vice versa, while mechanism on its own should be legitimate. But Engels’ mistaken judgment was targeting the French context. The third of Engels’ mistaken claims is the assumption that chemistry emerged suddenly in the nineteenth century (or at least with Lavoisier). On the contrary, matter theory, materialism, and “philosophies of nature” in the eighteenth century, from Stahl to the Stahlian chemists Guillaume- François Rouelle, Gabriel-François Venel, and thinkers influenced by them such as Diderot (who was an active presence at Rouelle’s lectures at the Jardin du Roi for three years, 1754–17578), were, one might say, chemi- cally obsessed; in his articles for the Encyclopédie including “Chymie,” “Chaleur,” “Digestion,” and “Mixte,” Venel emphasized the chemical transformations of the substances involved in the digestive process as a specifically “vital” chemistry (Pépin 2012). Diderot (1975–2004) criticized physics for its abstraction and insisted that “it is from chemistry that it Varieties of Vital Materialism 47 learns or will learn the real causes” of natural phenomena (9:209). His metaphysics of a universally sensing matter—his enhanced materialism in which sensitivity (sensibilité, typically translated “sensibility”) is an irreduc- ible property of matter—is laden with chemical concepts and vocabulary, in a usage of the image of the body as chemical laboratory or distillation still: “The animal is the laboratory in which sensitivity shifts from being inert to being active.”9 More bluntly put: just as La Mettrie writes a work entitled L’Homme-Machine which turns out to have nothing to do with, say, Cartesian mechanism—and granted, La Mettrie’s relation to Descartes is not univocal either—, Diderot, playing non-trivially on the most classic mechanist analogy of all, observes: “What a difference there is, between a sensing, living watch and a golden, iron, silver or copper watch!” (Éléments de physiologie, in Diderot 1975–2004, 17:335). Indeed, the period spanning the early 1700s (with John Toland’s 1704 Letters to Serena) to the 1770s (with Diderot’s later reflections on mat- ter, atomism, and physiology) marks a considerable reconfiguration of mat- ter theory, compared to its earlier Baconian forms (Giglioni 2010). Stated positively, matter takes on an increasing diversity and density of proper- ties: from passive (including the rather polemically phrased “stupid and senseless Matter” of Ralph Cudworth in the 1690s; he also describes the world according to mechanists as “nothing else but a heap of dust, for- tuitously agitated, or a dead cadaverous thing, that hath no signatures of mind and understanding, counsel and wisdom at all upon it ...”10) or mechanistic (defined strictly in terms of size, shape, and motion), matter becomes dynamic and plastic, as in Toland’s (1704) statement in the fifth of the Letters to Serena, that “Activity ought to enter into the Definition of Matter, it ought likewise to express the Essence thereof” (165). Matter is further described as chemically active and perhaps even self-organizing in a variety of clandestine works such as Abraham Gaultier’s Parité de la vie et de la mort or Réponse à un théologien (1714) and the anonymous L’Âme Matérielle (mid-1720s). Some decades later, building by now on an explic- itly chemical matter theory, in the Principes philosophiques sur la matière et le mouvement, Diderot will write,

I lay my eyes on the general mass of bodies; I see everything in action and reaction; everything being destroyed in one form and recomposed in another; sublimations, dissolutions and combinations of all kinds: all of these phenomena are incompatible with the homogeneity of matter. From this I conclude that it is heterogeneous; that there is an infinite number of varied elements in nature; that each of these elements, in its variety, has its own unique, innate, unchanging, eter- nal and indestructible force; and that these forces belonging to the body [provoke] actions external to the body. From this emerges the general movement or rather fermentation of the universe. (Diderot 1975–2004, 17:17–18) 48 Wolfe As matter incorporates further properties (as in Maupertuis’ “molecules” which he describes as endowed with desire, appetition, instinct, and mem- ory), it becomes vitalized, notably when it is understood as possessing prop- erties such as irritability and sensibility (Wolfe 2014). Here, it is important not to oppose the concepts of vitalism and material- ism, for at least two reasons:11 first, that as mentioned, the concept of mat- ter is becoming reconfigured so it possesses irreducibly vital properties (if Toland had granted it motion and activity, and rejected Newton’s distinction between gravity and matter, the texts cited above add on additional, bio- medically or embryologically derived properties); but also, second, because several distinctive figures of eighteenth-century medical vitalist thought insist on the irreducible materiality of the living systems they study. The “life” they are interested in is not that of a vital principle, archaeus, semina rerum, vis vita or entelechy: it is that of a living body, or organism. This interrelation or even interpenetration of a materialist project to understand Life, and a vitalist project of articulating the specific, organized materiality of living bodies, shows how the purported novelty of a “new materialism” which claims to discover, in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century, the fact of our embodiment, including its cultural ramifications, may need to be taken with a considerable dose of salt. In this chapter I seek to reconstruct this process of articulation of a vital materialism, which is so different from the old vision of a mechanistic mate- rialism (Kaitaro 2008, Wolfe 2012), as classically presented by Engels. In order to do so, I suggest first a general distinction between two forms of materialism, followed by a second, more specific distinction between active and passive matter and the consequent versions of materialism. I then con- sider what it means for materialism to be specifically vital, its notion of embodiment cum reduction, which means that it is not a wholesale holism, before concluding. Vital materialism embraces a reductionist dimension in its appeal to a medical (or medicalized) approach to body:soul relations (influ- enced by medico-theoretic texts with explicit materialist implications for the early modern reader, such as Galen’s Quod animi mores: cf. Corneanu, ms. 2013). Matter is active, but not spiritualized.

Two Materialisms Ever since the appearance of the term “materialist” in philosophy as, origi- nally, a term used by its adversaries, such as Henry More (Bloch 1978), mate- rialist philosophy and its definition have been something of a Kampfplatz. I suggest that the opposition between a new and an old materialism might suffer if we consider the historical, scientific, rhetorical, and ontological com- plexities of early modern materialism, just as the latter complexities cause the concept of “mechanistic materialism” to crumble (especially in its absolutist form, according to which all forms of materialism amount to mechanistic materialism). Indeed, we should really distinguish between several forms of Varieties of Vital Materialism 49 materialism, most basically between two ­materialist ­theses: one concerning the materiality of the world and the other concerning the mind-brain rela- tion. After outlining this distinction, I turn to the more immediately relevant distinction between “active” and “passive” understandings of matter (with their corresponding visions of materialism). A materialism of active matter will in turn, I show, either restrict itself to a kind of physicalist conception of activity (e.g., motion is a property of matter) or instead offer a definition of matter in which properties such as sensation and generally life are basic: a vital materialism. The two basic materialist theses, which are independent of each other, although they can also be found together, are: (i) a cosmological thesis about the materiality of the world, according to which everything that exists is material, or the product of interaction between material entities, with a strong causal connection binding the phenomena of the universe to one another, and (ii) an “identity” thesis (in the eighteenth century it would have been called a “psychological” thesis, as it was by Georg Friedrich Meier12) concerning the identity of mind and brain: of mental processes and cerebral processes—a more cerebral form of materialism. Notice, further, that both (i) and (ii) allow for more or less dynamic or static versions, i.e., just like matter itself, the brain too can be understood as passive or active (as in Laurence Sterne’s “culturally neuroplastic” presentation of brain and ani- mal spirits in Tristram Shandy: Wolfe 2016). The version of the first thesis that is most relevant here is initially an attribution of basic properties such as motion to matter. For instance, in his 1704 Letters to Serena, John Toland (1704/1976) rejected the strong dis- tinction between matter and motion: “Matter is but Motion under a certain Consideration” (C 4). The fifth letter (163f.) is explicitly entitled Motion essential to Matter, and in it Toland states that “All the Matter in Nature, every Part and Parcel of it, has bin ever in motion, and can never be other- wise” (167), and “there’s but one sort of Matter in the Universe” (174), in a ceaseless process of transformation: “All the Parts of the Universe are in this constant Motion of destroying and begetting, of begetting and destroying” (188). In addition—as La Mettrie and Diderot emphasize more dramati- cally—matter is not just in some sort of “intestine” motion (Toland speaks later on of its “autokinesy”); it is also fundamentally, inherently active: “Activity ought to enter into the Definition of Matter, it ought likewise to express the Essence thereof” (165); “action is essential to Matter” (160). Contrary to the common accusation that materialists reduce the world, life, and mind to a heap of dead, passive matter, Toland is explicit that “Matter neither ever was nor ever can be a sluggish, dead and inactive Lump, or in a state of absolute repose” (C 3); “I deny that Matter is or ever was an inactive dead Lump in absolute Repose, a lazy and unwieldy thing” (159).13 But quickly, the issue shifts from the attribution of motion or grav- ity to matter, to a yet more grievous attribution: thought, notably due to Voltaire’s rendition of Locke’s more prudent reflections on the lack of any 50 Wolfe obstacle preventing God from “superadding” the capacity of thought to matter (Locke 1975, 4.3.6). No one saw or expressed this more clearly than Fontenelle, the Secretary of the Académie des Sciences, in his 1752 Théorie des tourbillons cartésiens (Theory of Cartesian Vortices), late in his long career and life. Fontenelle reflected critically on what he saw as the arbi- trariness of Newtonian attraction; attributing attraction to matter was a small step away from granting it the power to think. God granting mat- ter the property of attraction would be quite arbitrary, and “if we grant this arbitrariness, we destroy any philosophical proof of the spirituality of the soul. God could just as well have granted thought to matter, as attrac- tion.”14 As much as thinkers such as Locke, Hartley, and Priestley invested real—and sincere—energy into dissociating thinking matter from atheism or other undesirable outcomes, they were a minority. To quote one voice among many, the Newtonian Humphry Ditton (1727): “Let him begin with making Matter and Motion think; and he shall end with making Gospel an Imposture” (359). Some thinkers will seek to integrate theses (i) and (ii), i.e., “cosmological” and “brain-mind” materialism, notably by insisting that the mind belongs to the same material nature as the rest of the world, or that our ideas, which come to us through our senses, are themselves material. Responding to Samuel Clarke’s criticisms of materialism (in the context of the “letter to Dodwell,” see Thomson 2008), Locke’s younger friend, the prominent deist Anthony Collins, combined these two strands of materialist argument. In his 1708 Reply to Mr Clarke’s Defence, Collins argued that thinking was a mode of matter: “human consciousness or thinking is a mode of some generical power in matter … it has generation, succession and corruption like all other modes of matter” (in Clarke [1738] 1978, 3:807), but also, in his subsequent Answer to Mr Clarke’s 3d Defence, made a connection between the empiricist account of the origin of ideas in sensation, and the materialist account of how “ideas of sensation” originate in the process of “bodies operat[ing] upon us” (Ibid., 3:863). Here, Collins adds the second (and at the time quite new) type of materialist thesis: thinking is a species of motion in the brain (866). Mind-brain identity and the materiality of the world can be combined with different metaphysical implications: either in more empiricist fashion (ideas come to us through the senses, transmitting information about mate- rial entities, and are indeed themselves composed of material processes— whether animal spirits or David Hartley’s “vibrunticles”;15 therefore the mind is inscribed in the materiality of the world), or as a more Spinozist- type claim about the world itself, to which minds and brains belong just like comets and earthworms. Thus the heterodox Benedictine monk Dom Deschamps, author of a then-unpublished Spinozist treatise which he showed to Diderot in the 1760s, immodestly entitled La Vérité ou le Vrai Système, wrote that “sensation and the idea we have of objects are nothing­ other than these objects themselves, inasmuch as they compose us, and Varieties of Vital Materialism 51 act on our parts, which are themselves always acting on one another.”16 But it was more common for materialist discussions of the mind-body (or mind-brain) problem to bracket off metaphysics and insist that theirs was a strictly empirical enquiry. As La Mettrie wrote at the beginning of L’Homme-Machine, “Experience and observation should therefore be our only guides here. Both are to be found throughout the records of the physi- cians who were philosophers, and not in the works of the philosophers who were not physicians” (La Mettrie [1751] 1987, 1:66). Out of all this diversity of early modern materialism(s), which I have sought to present in the form of a typology, for present purposes we need to retain one more specific, yet fundamental feature, which I discuss in the following section: the difference between passive and active understandings of matter (and thus passive and active forms of materialism).

Passive and Active Matter Of the many forms of materialism, articulated with quite diverse “sci- entific” bases (from the non-experimentally oriented Epicureanism and naturalized Renaissance Aristotelianism in manuscripts like the Treatise of the Three Impostors or L’Âme Matérielle to medicine, Epicureanism, and Cartesianism in La Mettrie, or physics for Hobbes and physics and chemistry for d’Holbach, etc.), I suggested above that we distinguish two fundamental claims, one concerning the nature of the world, the other concerning the mind-brain (or earlier, body-soul) relation. But recall my cautionary remark that both the concept of mechanistic materialism and the opposition between “new” and “old” materialisms were misguided, or conceptually fragile, because of the presence of an active matter concept and an embodied materialism in a variety of the relevant texts (embodi- ment and active matter go hand and in hand but are neither synonymous nor interdependent). In that sense, we should also distinguish between materialisms based on passive matter and on active matter, where the latter focus on activity includes notions of dynamism, self-transformation, plasticity, and so on. And the latter set of properties is precisely what the “new materialist” theo- rist claims is new, or at least “new” in the sense that Bergson or Whitehead will be considered familiar while Anthony Collins, Denis Diderot, or Joseph Priestley will not (together with the occasional erroneous inclusion of Descartes in the older materialism17). The distinction between passive and active forms of materialism is not per se chronological or “diachronic,” as it exists in clearly synchronic form: that is, there was no need of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, or phenomenology for materialism to include tensions between the vision of an inert, dead, static, passive matter and, for example, Toland’s (1704) insistence on activity as the “essence” of matter (165), or Diderot’s promotion of sensibility as a “universal” or “essential” property of matter (he uses both terms).18 52 Wolfe In the very first paragraph of Diderot’s unpublished 1769 “dialogue” Le Rêve de D’Alembert, the character D’Alembert, who is a partisan of substance dualism and is challenging the character Diderot—a materialist— to account for the existence of consciousness and thought, introduces the problem of sensibility as a property. Referring to a discussion that seems to have taken place before the text begins, he declares to Diderot, “this sensi- bility … if it is a general and essential quality of matter, then stones must sense” (Diderot 1975–2004, 17:90). Sensibility is hence present from the first lines of the text, and the word (“sensibilité”) is used a total of thirty- seven times; Diderot states, revises, emends, and restates this materialism of living, sensing matter in a variety of works, both in the Rêve and in his more “empirically” oriented writings such as the Principes philosophiques sur la matière et le mouvement and the Eléments de physiologie. Ironically, the vision of “mechanical,” “automatic” passivity which the new materialists diagnose in the old materialism, is precisely what apologeti- cists and other, often Christian-influenced thinkers such as the Cambridge Platonists, attacked in materialism simpliciter. Recall Cudworth’s portrayal of matter as “stupid and senseless” (Cudworth, 1731, Book 1, chapter 2, sec- tion 8). Indeed, antimaterialists also appealed to these sorts of strong intui- tions, in order to claim that the stupidity of materialists somehow mirrors the stupidity of matter itself. Cudworth denied that “all Being and Perfection that is found in the World” could “spring up and arise out of the dark Womb of unthinking Matter” (Cudworth, 1731, Book 1, chapter 2, section 13). The great Jansenist Pierre Nicole (1671), who significantly influenced Locke, also wrote around the same time that one cannot conceive of “this dead and unfeeling mass we call matter” as being “an eternal being”; it is clear, Nicole continues, that “matter lacks any internal cause of its existence … it is ridiculous to attribute to the most vile and despicable of all beings, the greatest of perfections, which is to exist by oneself [d’être par soi-même]” (in Nicole 1714, 27). This is not just a metaphysical opposition between two matter concepts, of course. A major motivation in these attacks is to defend free will (and the free activity of the soul) against fatalism (and the conditioned picture of activity associated with efficient causation and the physical world). A some- what intuitive equation is made between the passivity of matter, the figure of the automaton, and fatalism, versus Life, the soul, and free will. The anthropocentrism in Cudworth’s or Nicole’s statements was clear; Leibniz (otherwise a great lover of machines and partisan of mechanical explana- tions) adds the figure of the automaton and equates “the wicked doctrine of those who believe the soul to be material, following Epicurus and Hobbes” with the belief that “man himself is just a body or an Automaton.”19 But of course the danger of passive, automatic matter is not alone; it is mir- rored, as it were, by the danger that More, Leibniz (and later Kant) were equally concerned with: hylozoism, i.e., matter understood as alive and active. (One could, counterfactually but without too much effort, imagine Varieties of Vital Materialism 53 new-materialist reflections on a “good” vision of active matter, in Glisson, Cavendish, or Diderot, versus a “bad” vision of mechanistically specified passive matter, in Hobbes or d’Holbach). But such an opposition, reminis- cent of works such as Carolyn Merchant’s Death of Nature, yields at best a neo-paganism—an invocation of a fully animistic universe—, which is an odd point of arrival for materialism, but one which would be welcomed by those for whom the “new materialist ontology” focuses on the “vibrant, constitutive, aleatory and even immaterial indices that characterize the new senses of materiality and materialization.”20 If materialism was not strictly a metaphysics of inert, static, mechanisti- cally specifiable matter, what was it? We have seen that it frequently sought to articulate newer, enhanced models of matter as possessing activity, dyna- mism, sensation, and thus, in some cases, Life (I am not suggesting that materialism in all of its forms yields or implies a vital matter concept). But so far we have said little about specifically vital materialism.

Vital Materialism21 When discussing Engels’ claim that the French materialists of the eight- eenth century were mechanistic materialists who conceived of the body (indeed, “man,” as he says) as being like a machine, I suggested that it contained several historical errors but also conceptual instabilities, which on any closer examination would lead the claim to fall apart. Among them were the presence in the eighteenth century of a specifically embodied form of materialism, along with the (often still quite programmatic) attempts to sketch out a “chemical materialism,” that is, a materialism based on a concept of matter that had integrated post-Stahlian chemistry as found in Rouelle and especially, Venel’s article “Chymie” in the Encyclopédie. Indeed, the latter article is primarily a presentation of a “vital chemistry” that also plays out in Diderot’s Rêve de D’Alembert. For Venel (1753), organic molecules and organized bodies are subject to laws that are differ- ent from the laws of matter in motion; as sources, he refers both to Buffon and to the errors of iatromechanist physicians with respect to the function- ing of the “animal economy” (410). He speaks of “changes” which bodies undergo, such that they “move from the non-organic state to the organic state,” and suggests that the “phenomena of organisation [i.e., of organ- ism, CW] should be treated by a science separate from all other parts of Physic” (410). Diderot builds on this kind of vital chemistry in his chemi- cal “general formula” for life in the Rêve, which focuses on the process of digestion: “Eat, digest, and distill in vasi licito, et fiat homo secundum artem” (Diderot, 1975–2004, 17:96). I also mentioned that we should be careful about ahistorical oppositions between materialism and vitalism. However, there is also a risk of losing sight of what is properly materialist in vital materialism. Notably, its embod- ied focus comes hand in hand with a form of reductionism, although it is, to 54 Wolfe be sure, an irreducibly embodied reductionism: “he who wishes to know the properties of the soul must first search for those which manifest themselves clearly in the body,” La Mettrie writes in the Traité de l’âme ([1751] 1987, 1:125). Or, in a phrasing with subtly different philosophical implications in his L’Homme-Machine: “the various states of the soul are always correla- tive with those of the body” (1:73). Diderot’s defense of body:soul reduction takes the following form: “the action of the soul on the body is the action of one part of the body on another, and the action of the body on the soul is again that of one part of the body on another” (Éléments de physiologie, in Diderot 1975–2004, 17:334–335). In each of these iterations, higher-level properties are reduced to lower-level properties, but the lower level remains animate, and alive. A more emergentist rendition of the idea is found in the anonymous L’Âme matérielle (1720s), in a phrase attributed to Lucretius, but not found as such in the original of De rerum natura: “the soul is to the body as scent is to incense” (Anon. [1725–1730] 2003, 174; cf. De rerum natura 3:327–330). Yet in all of these versions, there is an irreducibility of “body”—which implies that these forms of reductionism are not, to use another once-popular term of art, eliminativist. But one might object that the mere language of “body,” while indeed implying that here materialism is not understood as synonymous with physi- calism, is not sufficient evidence for the articulated presence of a vital mate- rialism. After all, physico-materialists (a.k.a. “mechanical materialists”) like Hobbes also regularly emphasized that “That which is not body is no part of the universe” and “there is no motion save of corporeal substance” to the extent that Cudworth suggested as a synonym for “materialism,” the word “corporealism.”22 Did vital materialism have a concept of Life and body that did not reduce to physical bodies in the strictest sense? The answer here is a qualified “yes,” or rather, an emphatic “yes” with an instant additional specification: just because the vital materialist sought to do (explanatory and/or ontological) justice to the living body did not mean that she took the additional step of transferring the latter out of physical space, into a myste- rious transcendent realm. Differently put, the integrated vision of body and mind we find in, for exam- ple, La Mettrie and Diderot is (a) still a monism, and (b) one with reductionist components. The vital materialist could not countenance an assertion such as “the mind does not use the body, but fulfills itself through it while at the same time transferring the body outside of physical space” (Merleau-Ponty 1963, 208–209, trans. modified), a form of dualism which traces back to the Husserlian distinction between Körper, “body” in the sense of one body among others in a vast mechanistic universe of bodies, and Leib, “flesh” in the sense of a subjectivity which is the locus of experience. Nor could she blithely confuse materialism with enactivist phenomenology, as some new materialists do, if one considers enactivist partis pris such as “Life is not physical in the standard materialist sense of purely external structure and function. Life realizes a kind of interiority, the interiority of selfhood and Varieties of Vital Materialism 55 sense-making. We accordingly need an expanded notion of the physical to account for the organism or living being” (Thompson 2007, 238). In fact, this “expanded notion of the physical” has always been present; it is rather the impoverished picture of “standard materialism” (reminiscent of Engels again) that needs to be revised. Yet a more enriched, vital materialism is not a metaphysics of life or of organism; its attitude toward proclaimed irreducible totalities would be that “… the Whole itself is a product, pro- duced as nothing more than a part alongside other parts, which it neither unifies nor totalizes, though it has an effect on other parts simply because it establishes aberrant paths of communication between noncommunicating vessels, transverse unities between elements that retain all their differences within their own particular boundaries” (Deleuze and Guattari 1977, 42). If materialism is not necessarily physicalism, but develops concepts of living matter, it can have access to a concept of organic matter, or flesh—yet not flesh in a transcendentalized sense, “outside of physical space.” The vital materialist is in fact quite sensitive to the difference between, say, “a golden, iron, silver or copper watch” and “a sensing, living watch,” as quoted ear- lier (Diderot 1975–2004, 17:335), or between “a man of bronze and a man of flesh” (Réfutation d’Helvétius, Diderot 1975–2004, 26:607). Yet this dif- ference need not appeal to a foundational subjectivity, a vital principle, or a mysticism of the flesh; although whether a man of bronze and a man of flesh differ according to an ontological difference is not easy to say.23 (If we say they differ due to different types of material organization, this does not put to rest the question of “ontological or not?”.) Now, vital materialism is also not univocal: even if La Mettrie shares a corporeal, medico-biological but also “sanguine,” “spirited” focus with Diderot, his conception of the similarities and differences between a “living watch” (an organism) and a “silver or copper watch” (a machine) is not quite the same. When he uses a similar image, in his Abrégé des systèmes, it is in the context of a comparative discussion of different species, where his point is that there is no real boundary between the animal and the human, or complex and simple forms of animal life. If a microscopic life-form does not feel or think like we do, it is because of the difference in its organization. While Diderot seemed concerned with the particular material realiza- tion of “watch,” that is, a flesh-and-blood arrangement of parts versus a strictly mechanical arrangement of parts, La Mettrie writes that the differ- ence between a higher life-form and a lower one is just like that between a “repeater watch” (montre à répétition) and a common watch: the former is more expensive than the latter, with the implication being because its mechanism is more complex (La Mettrie ([1751] 1987, 1:276). Yet when La Mettrie uses clock or watch metaphors elsewhere (e.g., “The body is but a watch, whose watchmaker is the new chyle,” in L’Homme-Machine, 1:105), he generally means them heuristically rather than literally, and above all, he will sometimes insist that our mechanism is specifically chemi- cal, which is to say, chemico-vital. Indeed, one could imagine a spectrum of 56 Wolfe positions in which the watch metaphor is used to deal with organisms, from the most organismic (Diderot), to the most mechanistic (perhaps Descartes, or iatromechanists such as Borelli). But many of the interesting cases fall in between, such as La Mettrie, who is closer to Diderot but more deflationary, or Locke, who is yet more deflationary, to the extent that there is nothing particularly “vital” anymore in the analysis:

what is a watch? It is plain it is nothing but a fit organization or con- struction of parts to a certain end, which, when a sufficient force is added to it, it is capable to attain. If we would suppose this machine one continued body, all whose organized parts were repaired, increased, or diminished by a constant addition or separation of insensible parts, with one common life, we should have something very much like the body of an animal; with this difference, That, in an animal the fitness of the organization, and the motion wherein life consists, begin together, the motion coming from within; but in machines the force coming sen- sibly from without, is often away when the organ is in order, and well fitted to receive it. (Locke 1975, 2.27.5)

From the early anti-materialist depictions of a Necropolis—a dead, cold, mechanically specified matter to which humanity (value, sentiment, free- dom) is reduced—to the more historicized claims of Engels or again, the more theoretically determined opposition of “old” and “new” promoted by new materialism, I hope to have shown that this picture of affairs of passive matter misses some crucial features of early modern materialism. Historically, the projection of a “dead materialism” concept misses the vital character of Radical Enlightenment materialism, including in some cases, its chemically nourished matter theory. Ethically, it misses both the specifi- cally “affective” (that is, flesh-and-blood) determinism of a La Mettrie and the more organismic vision of a Diderot, with its intimations of sympathy and thus of intersubjectivity. Indeed, on the metaphysical level, the new materialist discourse seems to miss the dimension of an “ontology of rela- tions,” perhaps most strongly articulated in Spinoza, but quite present in authors such as d’Holbach, Diderot, and Dom Deschamps: the idea that locating individuality in a world of causal relations is not mere “scient- ism” but rather, a non-Cartesian, non-egological conception of individuality (Wolfe 2015). However, if the twin objections voiced by Engels and the new material- ists are not immune to the consequences of a closer examination of vital materialism, this does not mean that all of the features of new materialism are simply “there” in the early modern period, for instance, subjectivity.24 Granted, the crudeness with which some commentators oppose the merely external, spatial (and implicitly, mechanistic) world of the materialist to an internal, temporal world of mind and freedom can be surprising, as in Varieties of Vital Materialism 57 the Diderot scholar Emita Hill’s (1968) comment that “Materialism as a working philosophy,­ used as a tool in the scientific investigation of the mate- rial universe, is appropriate and highly effective. Intended for the objec- tive analysis and description of the world of externals, it yields disastrous results when applied to the inner, subjective world of human nature, human thought, and human emotions” (Hill 1968, 90). This is a very similar judg- ment to the more recent pronouncement by the enactivist theorist Evan Thompson (2007), which I cited above: “Life is not physical in the standard materialist sense of purely external structure and function. Life realizes a kind of interiority, the interiority of selfhood and sense-making. We accord- ingly need an expanded notion of the physical to account for the organism or living being” (238), or to Sartre’s polemic against materialism, in which he sharply opposed a purely mechanical world of “pure externality” (Sartre 1990, 89–90, 94), “governed from outside, manipulated by blind causal chains” (86), to the world of values and action (120, 127–28). La Mettrie, the author of L’Art de jouir, might have been surprised to hear that materialism was all about cold, mechanical externality, although to be fair, Diderot did worry about how to reconcile his materialist com- mitments and his romantic sentiments: “I am enraged at being trapped in this “devil’s philosophy” (diable de philosophie) which my mind cannot but approve, while my heart rejects it. I cannot bear to think that my feelings for you … are subject to anything else in the world, or dependent … on the passage of a comet.”25 In some similar letters, he proposes as a “solution” to this tension between materialist philosophy and his feelings, a vision of love at the molecular level, enduring after death, as our bodies decompose but the “molecules” composing them enter into new configurations.26 Again, a chemically inspired vital materialism. It does not take a great effort on our part, as readers, to see an odd consonance between Cudworth-style denunciations of brute, stupid matter, Engels’ less sanguine diagnosis of a mechanistic materialism, and the more enthused new materialist-style critiques of the old, passive, and mechanistic materialism, with Hill and Thompson lying somewhere in between. But nev- ertheless, if we replace the oddly normative language surrounding concern with the “inner life” with the problem of personhood, we are faced with a classic and substantial objection to materialism: that it does not yield a rich sense of individuality or personhood, going back at least to criticisms of Spinozist substance monism (what is the individuality of one finite mode among other finite modes?). Indeed, Katherine Hayles’ remark concerning the absence of “level-specific dynamics” in Barad and new materialism as a whole (in her contribution to this volume), can be seen as a version of this objection. However, concerns with materiality in recent feminist discourse are cer- tainly not reducible to more or less dualist intuitive appeals to a more authen- tic inner world versus a dehumanized world of externality. This may have been true in some cases, but is not of authors such as Karen Barad, whose 58 Wolfe work is perhaps the major instance of feminist science studies embracing naturalism (Barad 2003).27 Barad is unique in seeking to connect science studies to a feminist ontology, in which subject and object are “intra-actively constituted,” as she says, within specific practices. Barad’s “agential real- ism” holds that we are, both metaphysically and ethically, “accountable” to the material. However, this accountability “is not about representations of an independent reality, but about the real consequences, interventions, creative possibilities, and responsibilities of intra-acting within the world” (Barad 1996, 188). This is a form of new materialism because she empha- sizes, again with a stress on “intra-action,” that materiality is agential reality (Barad 1998, 109). We might take this as a sort of Cartwrightian reminder that Nature need not be understood, Vienna Circle-style, in nomological terms—yet this recognition does not lead to an anti-naturalist attitude, since for Barad, we should recognize the constitutive interaction between experi- ment, apparatus, subject, etc. (which was also Ian Hacking’s point, and more broadly speaking, John Dewey’s, regarding an “interactionist” picture of Nature). In addition, Barad maintains that “the body’s materiality—for example, its anatomy and physiology … actively matter to the processes of materialization” (Barad 2003, 809), and the better we understand this, the more we can—agentially—connect body and power. A difference that does endure, in my view, between vital materialism and new materialist talk of “materiality,” is that the latter is primarily defined in terms of (and oriented towards) issues of agency, self-construction, and historicity, notably with regard to gender. In one statement of the field, “in many respects, a scholarly and theoretical focus on the body’s materiality is nothing new: for several decades, feminists have denaturalized both embodi- ment and material objects, analyzing and specifying the manifold discursive practices through which bodies and matter are constituted as intelligible. The focus of such work has been on elucidating the processes through which norms and power relations are incorporated as forms of subjectivity or materialized in institutions, cultural practice, and facts” (Frost 2011, 70). Or, in Barad’s phrase, for new materialists, “matter is always already an ongoing historicity” (Barad 2003, 821); she has added more recently that “Materiality itself is always already a desiring dynamism, a reiterative recon- figuring, energized and energizing, enlivened and enlivening” (interview in Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 59). Even if authors like Barad have sought, in the name of a “relational ontology,” to blur the boundaries between this less naturalistic sense of materiality and the world of biological life, never- theless, materiality has very little to do with either the biomedical analy- ses which vital materialists appealed to (including in speculative ways), or with their reductionist, deflationary impetus—what Adorno called material- ism’s “unmasking tendency” (demaskienderende Tendenz) (cited in Benítez 1996, 307). It is, to use Frost’s word above, more of a “denaturalization.” There is no sense of either the explanatory power of reductionist explana- tions, or even, sensu La Mettrie, of their metaphysical courage, in the new Varieties of Vital Materialism 59 materialist ontophanies of “materiality, vitality, relationality, self-­creativity, ­productivity, unpredictability,” including Jane Bennett’s “enchanted materi- alism,” which ascribes agency to “inorganic phenomena such as the electric- ity grid, food and trash.”28 Even without seizing on Bennett’s formulations of new materialism, it seems clear that in this movement’s claim to be effecting a kind of paradigm shift “from epistemology, in all of its relation to critique, to ontology, where the being of things is valued alongside that of persons,”29 two problems emerge: one, which is to some extent the topic of this chapter, that no such shift was needed (at least if one has any interest in the historical objects one is invoking, and their effectivity—beyond that, nothing prevents the theorist from constructing an idiosyncratic narrative), and the other, which I can only gesture towards here, that of the “flatness” of this ontology. Additionally, theories of materiality, including now the new materialism, even though the latter emphasizes its engagement with biology as another “agential” source, challenge the “essentialism” of traditional materialism, and sometimes its scientism (often with a surprisingly outdated vision of Descartes, Newton, and the “old materialists” as ideologists of the mastery and possession of nature). Without wanting to make it an absolute claim, I would remark that vital materialism as described here is neither an essen- tialism nor a scientism (least of all in Diderot).30 It manages to combine some of the impetus of “All matter quick, and bursting into birth”31 with a deflationary or otherwise destructive tendency, which can take the form of La Mettrie’s strong hedonism, or of Diderot’s suspicions towards the genre of moral philosophy. That is, a vital materialism does not lose sight of the destabilizing character of its reductionism (famously, when Diderot appeals to facts about embryo development to challenge theological orthodoxy). And its “vitality” is not achieved by reintroducing subjectivity, unlike theo- ries of materiality: “The materialist trend in philosophy recognizes the exist- ence of objective external reality, as well as its independence in relation to the knowing and perceiving subject. It acknowledges that being, the real, exists and is prior to its discovery, prior to the fact of being thought and known” (Althusser 1994, 60).

Notes 1 See, e.g., Hobbes 1976, chapter 7, section 1, p. 79; Elements of Law (1640), in Hobbes 1992, 4:8; Leviathan, Book III, 34.1. 2 Similar themes are to be found in an early letter to Voltaire, of June 11th (Diderot 1955–1970, 1:78); D’Holbach, in the first section of his Système de la nature ou des lois du monde physique et du monde moral ([1781] 1990, volume 1, chapter 1, pp. 44, 36. 3 But precisely, that early modern materialism was not exclusively or even pre- dominantly “physicalism” is something I will emphasize below, in contrast to the rather simplistic historical oppositions employed in new materialism. 4 As we will see, this rather dualist intuition about the living, thinking subject versus a world of mechanistic matter is also very operative in some strands of thought such as embodied phenomenology and enactivism (Merleau-Ponty 1963, 60 Wolfe Thompson 2007) but also—strange bedfellows—in pre-Althusserian humanist Marxism, e.g., in Sartre’s (1946) well-known “Materialism and Revolution.” 5 Hermann von Helmholtz made a similar point in his 1854 lecture “On the Interaction of Natural Forces,” appealing less to the advances of nineteenth- century biochemistry and more to thermodynamics. But Helmholtz’s target is not the materialists of the previous century, but its automata: “To the builders of automata of the last century, men and animals appeared as clockwork which was never wound up, and created the force which they exerted out of noth- ing. They did not know how to establish a connexion between the nutriment consumed and the work generated. Since, however, we have learned to discern in the steam engine this origin of mechanical force, we must inquire whether something similar does not hold good with regard to men” (cited in Kang 2011, 230–31). 6 E.g., Francis Crick’s (overconfident?) prediction, “To those of you who may be vitalists, I would make this prophecy: what everyone believed yesterday, and you believe today, only cranks will believe tomorrow” (1966, 99). 7 “Body” and “machine” were often defined interdependently, e.g., in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie, which defines “machine” in 1694 as “a set of parts or organs which form a whole, living or not, and produce determinate effects without transmitting a force externally; organism, body” (Cayrou 1948, s.v. “Machine,” 530). 8 His lecture notes on Rouelle were first published in 1887, and are now available in the standard edition of his works: Cours de chimie de Mr Rouelle, in Diderot 1975–2004, volume 9. 9 Diderot, letter to Duclos of October 10 1765, in Diderot 1955–1970, 5:141. 10 Cudworth 1731, Book 1, chapter 2, section 8 and Cudworth [1678] 1977, Book I, chapter 3, section XXXVII, 147. 11 In earlier work I have already criticized the surprisingly ahistorical opposition between the two found in the Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science, according to which “Materialists make the ultimate principles mat- ter and motion; vitalists, the soul or an irreducible life force” (Wellman 2003). Medical vitalists in the eighteenth century recurrently insist on the specific mate- riality of the systems (organs, glands, nervous fibres) that they discuss. 12 Meier (1757) 2007, section 361; Rumore (2016). 13 Earlier Toland had attributed this view to Anaxagoras; he says much more about the idea of active matter as a Brunian “modern” invention but I shall not discuss that aspect here notably for reasons of space. 14 Fontenelle 1752, Réflexions sur la théorie précédente, section 3, in Fontenelle 1829, 71, emphasis mine. 15 Hartley wished to elaborate a Newtonian-inspired “neurophysics” which would fill in the blanks left by Locke’s deliberate bracketing-off of “physical consid- eration of the mind” (Locke 1975, 1.1.2): Locke had stated that he would not “meddle” with such considerations, including “what motions of our spirits or alterations of our bodies we come to have any sensation by our organs, or any ideas in our understandings; and whether those ideas do in their formation, any or all of them, depend on matter or not” (1.1.2), although see his carefully hedged appeals to corpuscularian explanations at 2.2.2, 7.10, and 8.11: bodies produce ideas in us by “impulses,” in a kind of alternate picture of the project of the Essay discussed by Jess Keiser in his contribution to the present volume. Hartley (1749) postulated the existence of small vibrations (“vibrunticles”) which are impressed in the solid filaments of the nerves by external objects; sensations are transmitted by ætherial vibration to the infinitesimal particles that comprise the substance of the brain. These vibrations represent different primary sensations, or “simple ideas” in the brain (according to their differences in degree, kind, and place), which can become complex ideas through associa- Varieties of Vital Materialism 61 tions with other chains of vibrations (Hartley 1749, 1:13–16). That Hartley, less carefully than Locke, tried to tack on an anti-materialist clause here (“I do not, by ascribing the performance of sensation to vibrations excited in the medullary substance, in the least presume to assert, or intimate, that Matter can be endowed with the power of sensation,” 33) does not alter the fact that he is proposing a causal, associative, naturalized account of the psychophysiology of mental processes. For more on this gradual naturalization of Lockean associa- tionism, see Wolfe (forthcoming). 16 Deschamps, La Vérité ou le Vrai Système, in Deschamps 1993, 404. 17 Bourdin’s discussion of Althusser and Diderot—as forms of an aleatory, Lucretian materialism—seems a more interesting way of handling such “old/new” concepts in materialism. See Bourdin 2000 and Althusser 1994 and 2005 (but to be fair, some new materialists have identified Althusser as a kindred spirit: see Coole and Frost 2010, 35). 18 I leave aside here Diderot’s wavering on whether sensibility is a property of the “element” (the basic constituent of matter) or the “organization” (the organized whole), including in the Rêve (Diderot 1975–2004, 17:105). See Wolfe 2014 for discussion. 19 Leibniz’s Réponse aux réflexions contenues dans la Seconde Édition du Dictionnaire critique de M. Bayle, article Rorarius, sur le système de l’Harmonie Préétablie, in Leibniz 1978, 4:559. In addition to Cudworth and Leibniz, see, e.g., the apologeticist Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier’s (1769) warnings on the danger of reducing “men to automata,” in his defense of the Christian religion against free-thinking (I:282, 458; discussion in Citton 2006, 175). 20 Coole and Frost 2010, 14–15, emphasis mine. 21 For some historical background on this category, covering many more authors than discussed here, see Zammito 2008, 430f. 22 Hobbes [1651] 1994, Book IV, section 46, p. 459; Hobbes 1976, chapter 37, section 4, p. 447; Cudworth [1678] 1977, Book I, chapter 3, section 30, p. 135. (That Hobbes may not have been the arch-mechanist we think he was, being instead attentive to the nature of the living body, is the topic of Frost 2008, chapter 1, but the claim does not mesh well with Hobbes’ texts, as is discussed at greater length in Mogens Lærke’s chapter in this volume. If one wishes to find an early modern thinker who was both a systematic mechanist and was attuned to appetitive and ‘conative’ features of body, that thinker is Spinoza.) 23 With the benefit of Helmholtzian hindsight, one notices that Diderot doesn’t seem concerned with the difference between the power source of the two differ- ent systems (copper and flesh watches). For Diderot, matter is actually or poten- tially alive, hence self-organizing, and thus the question doesn’t arise. 24 I offer some suggestions for an early modern materialist theory of self (although not subjectivity or interiority), with reference to Diderot, in Wolfe 2015. 25 Letter of September 1769 to an unidentified female correspondent, in Diderot 1955–1970, 9:154–155. The comet reference is meant to connote universal determinism. 26 Diderot to Sophie Volland, October 17 1759, in Diderot 1955–1970, 2:283– 84. As regards selfhood, it is also worth noting that Diderot acknowledges a social dimension of self, again rather different from Emita Hill’s warnings about materialist treatments of internal life: “He who has studied himself, will have advanced in the knowledge of others, given, I think, that there is no virtue which is foreign to the wicked, nor vice foreign to the good” (Essai sur les règnes de Claude et Néron, in Diderot 1975–2004, 25:226). Diderot’s vital materialism is not blind to our “sentiments for others,” even if he never articulated a concept of moral sympathy, unlike Hume or Smith. 27 See Rouse 2004, and the chapters by Hayles and Willey in this volume (the latter discusses tensions within the new materialism precisely on these issues). 62 Wolfe 28 Bennett 2001 and 2010; Coole and Frost 2010, 9. New materialists including Bennett and Coole and Frost (but not Liz Wilson) would be happy to hear they have a predecessor in Elisabeth de Fontenay, who published a book in the 1980s entitled Diderot et le matérialisme enchanté, where Diderot’s enchanted material- ism was the good version of an affective materialism while the Marquis de Sade’s version was the bad one. Fontenay’s work did not mark a highpoint in Diderot studies. Less redolent of cosmology, ontophany or “rational metaphysics,” to use a Kantian phrase, is the debate on whether feminist theory should embrace biol- ogy (and how much of it); see Davis 2009. 29 From the October editors’ presentation of their 2016 “A Questionnaire on Materialisms,” Joselit et al. 2016, 3. 30 This fits rather well with Catherine Wilson’s discussion of the Ricoeur-Changeux debate in this volume. 31 Essay on Man, Book I, section 7, in Pope 1958, 44.

References Althusser, Louis. 1994. “Le courant souterrain du matérialisme de la rencontre” and “Portrait du philosophe matérialiste.” Vol. 1 of Écrits philosophiques et poli- tiques. Edited by F. Mathéron. Paris: Stock/IMEC. Althusser, Louis. 2005. “Du matérialisme aléatoire.” Multitudes 21: 179–94. (Anon.) (approx. 1725–1730) 2003. L’Âme Matérielle. Edited by A. Niderst. 3rd ed. Paris: Champion. Barad, Karen. 1996. “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism without Contradiction.” In Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science, edited by Lynn H. Nelson and Jack Nelson, 161–94. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Barad, Karen. 1998. “Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality.” differences 10: 87–128. Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801–31. Benítez, Miguel. 1996. “Le doute comme méthode: scepticisme et matérialisme dans la littérature clandestine.” In Benítez, La face cachée des Lumières, 307–42. Paris/ Oxford: Universitas/Voltaire Foundation. Bennett, Jane. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bergier, Nicolas-Sylvestre. 1769. Apologie de la religion chrétienne: contre l’auteur du Christianisme dévoilé, & contre quelques autres critiques. 2 Vols. Paris: Humblot. Bloch, Olivier. 1978. “Sur les premières apparitions du mot ‘matérialiste.’” Raison présente 47: 3–16. Reprinted in Bloch, Matière à histoires. Paris: Vrin, 1998. Bourdin, Jean-Claude. 2000. “The Uncertain Materialism of Louis Althusser.” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 22 (1): 271–87. Cayrou, Gaston. 1948. Le français classique. Lexique de la langue du dix-septième siècle. Paris: Didier. Citton, Yves. 2006. L’Envers de la Liberté. L’invention d’un imaginaire spinoziste dans la France des Lumières. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam. Clarke, Samuel (1738) 1978. The Works of Samuel Clarke. 4 Vols. Reprint, New York: Garland. Varieties of Vital Materialism 63 Coole, Deborah, and Samantha Frost. 2010. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Coole and Frost, 1–43. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Corneanu, Sorana. 2013. The Care of the Whole Man: Medicine and Theology in the Late Renaissance (ms.). Crick, Francis. 1966. Of Molecules and Men. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Cudworth, Ralph (1678) 1977. The True Intellectual System of the Universe. London: R. Royston; Reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms. Cudworth, Ralph. 1731. A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality. Written before 1688; published posthumously. Davis, Noela. 2009. “New Materialism and Feminism’s Anti-Biologism: A Response to Sara Ahmed.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 16: 67–80. Dear, Peter. 1995. Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1977. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1973). Translated by R. Hurley et al., New York: Viking Press. Descartes, René, (AT). “Traité de l’Homme.” In Descartes, Œuvres, edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery, new presentation by B. Rochot and P. Costabel. Paris: Vrin-CNRS 1964–1974, Vol. IX. Deschamps, Dom Léger-Marie. 1993. La Vérité ou le vrai Système … par demandes et réponses (1761, 1770–1772). In Œuvres philosophiques, edited by B. Delhaume. 2 Vols. Paris: Vrin. Diderot, Denis. 1955–1970. Correspondance. Edited by G. Roth. 9 Vols. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Diderot, Denis. 1975–2004. Œuvres complètes. Edited by H. Dieckmann, J. Proust, and J. Varloot. Paris: Hermann. Ditton, Humphry. 1727. A Discourse concerning the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. 4th ed. Original publication 1712. London: J. Batley. Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Engels, Friedrich. 1982. Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie (1888). In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke. Vol. 21. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de. 1829. Théorie des tourbillons Cartésiens; avec des réflexions sur l’attraction (1752). In Œuvres de Fontenelle. Vol. 3, 5–80. Paris: Salmon. Frost, Samantha. 2008. Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Frost, Samantha. 2011. “The Implications of the New Materialisms for Feminist Epistemology.” In Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge, edited by Heidi Grasswick, 69–83. Dordrecht: Springer. Gaultier, Abraham. 1993. Parité de la vie et de la mort. La Réponse du médecin Gaultier (1714). Edited by O. Bloch. Paris: University of Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. Giglioni, Guido. 2010. “Mastering the Appetites of Matter. Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum.” In The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge. Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, edited by Charles T. Wolfe and Ofer Gal, 149–67. Dordrecht: Springer. Hartley, David. 1749. Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty and His Expectations. 2 Vols. London: Richardson. 64 Wolfe Hill, Emita. 1968. “Materialism and Monsters in the Rêve de D’Alembert.” Diderot Studies 10: 67–93. Hobbes, Thomas. (1651) 1994. Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of A Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil. Edited by E. Curley with selected Latin variants. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Hobbes, Thomas. 1976. Thomas White’s ‘De Mundo’ Examined. Translated by H.W. Jones. London: Bradford University Press. Hobbes, Thomas. 1992. English Works. Edited by W. Molesworth. 12 Vols. London: J. Bohn. Reprint of 1839–1845 ed. London: Routledge/Thoemmes. Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’. 1990. Système de la Nature ou des lois du monde physique et du monde moral (1781). 1st ed. 1770. Reprint. Edited J. Boulad-Ayoub. Paris: Fayard, coll. “Corpus.” Joselit, David, Lambert-Beatty, Carrie, and Foster, Hal (eds.), October 155 (Winter 2016): “A Questionnaire on Materialisms.” Kaitaro, Timo. 2008. “Can Matter Mark the Hours? Eighteenth-century Vitalist Materialism and Functional Properties.” Science in Context 21 (4): 581–92. Kang, Minsoo. 2011. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. (1751) 1987. Œuvres philosophiques. Edited by F. Markovits. 2 Vols. Paris: Fayard, “Corpus.” Landes, Joan B. 2011. “Vaucanson’s Automata as Devices of Enlightenment.” Sjuttonhundratal 8: 50–59. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1978. Philosophischen Schriften. Edited by G.J. Gerhardt. 7 Vols. Reprint. Hildesheim/New York: G. Olms. Locke, John. 1975. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by P. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meier, Georg Friedrich. (1757) 2007. Metaphysik. Zweyter Theil. Die Cosmologie. Halle. Reprint of 1767 2nd ed. Hildesheim: Olms. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1963. The Structure of Behaviour. Translated by A.L. Fisher. Boston: Beacon Press. Nicole, Pierre. 1714. Essais de morale. Original edition 1671. Second discours, Contenant en abrégé les preuves naturelles de l’existence de Dieu. Paris: G. Desprez. Pépin, François. 2012. La Philosophie expérimentale de Diderot et la chimie. Paris: Garnier, coll. “Histoire et philosophie des sciences.” Pope, Alexander. 1958. An Essay on Man. Edited by M. Mack. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Riskin, Jessica. 2003. “The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life.” Critical Inquiry 29 (4): 599–633. Rouse, Joseph. 2004. “Barad’s Feminist Naturalism.” Hypatia 19 (1): 142–61. Rumore, Paola. Forthcoming. “Meiers Theorie der Unsterblichkeit der Seele im zeitgenössischen Kontext.” In Georg Friedrich Meier (1718–1777). Philosophie zwischen populärer Reproduktion und theoretischer Innovation, edited by Gideon Stiening et al. Berlin: de Gruyter. Rumore, Paola. (2016). “Mechanism and Materialism in Early Modern German Philosophy.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy. doi:10.1080/09608 788.2016.1149691 Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1990. “Matérialisme et révolution” (1946). In Situations ­philosophiques, 81–140. Paris: Gallimard. Sawday, Jonathan. 1995. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge. Varieties of Vital Materialism 65 Thomson, Ann. 1989. “Pour en finir avec L’Homme machine.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 264: 883–85. Thomson, Ann. 2008. Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Toland, John. 1704. Letters to Serena. London: B. Lintot. Venel, Gabriel-François. 1753. “Chymie.” In Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire des arts et métiers, edited by D. Diderot and J. le Rond D’Alembert, Vol. 3, 408–21. Paris: Briasson. Wellman, Kathleen. 2003. “Materialism and vitalism.” In The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science, edited by J. L. Heilbron. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available online at http://www.oxfordreference.com (accessed 20 December 2014). Wolfe, Charles T. 2009. “A happiness fit for organic bodies: La Mettrie’s medical Epicureanism.” In Epicurus in the Enlightenment, edited by Neven Leddy and Avi Lifschitz, 69–83. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. Wolfe, Charles T. 2012. “Forms of Materialist Embodiment.” In Anatomy and the Organization of Knowledge 1500–1850, edited by Matthew Landers and Brian Muñoz, 129–44. London: Pickering and Chatto. Wolfe, Charles T. 2013. “Le mécanique face au vivant.” In L’automate: modèle, méta- phore, machine, merveille, edited by Aurélia Gaillard, Jean-Yves Goffi, Bernard Roukhomovsky, and Sophie Roux, 115–38. Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux. Wolfe, Charles T. 2014. “Sensibility as vital force or as property of matter in mid- eighteenth-century debates.” In The Discourse of Sensibility. The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment, edited by Henry Martyn Lloyd, 147–70. Dordrecht: Springer. Wolfe, Charles T. 2015. “Diderot and materialist theories of the self.” Journal of Society and Politics 9 (1): 75–94. Wolfe, Charles T. 2016. “Materialism and ‘the soft substance of the brain’: Diderot and plasticity.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, doi:10.1080/0960 8788.2016.1169989 Wolfe, Charles T. Forthcoming. “From Locke to Materialism: Empiricism, the Brain and the Stirrings of Ontology.” In Eighteenth-Century Empiricism and the Sciences, edited by Anne-Lise Rey and Siegfried Bodenmann. Dordrecht: Springer. Zammito, John H. 2008. “Médecin-philosoph: Persona for Radical Enlightenment.” Intellectual History Review 18 (3): 427–40. 3 Plastic Matters

Jess Keiser Tufts University

What binds together new materialists, write Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010) in their seminal collection on the subject, “is an antipathy towards oppositional ways of thinking” (8).1 Indeed, the founding gesture of new materialism involves banishing a binary. The new materialist argues that human subjects and matter are not opposed but rather fundamentally similar in nature; they both have the capacity for agency, vitality, and cre- ativity.2 But curiously new materialism’s monism—its belief that agency belongs as much to brute matter as it does to human beings—is instituted upon a dualism. One thing the new materialism cannot accord, and there- fore must reject, is any ontology that casts matter as essentially inert or passive in nature. And for good reason. As Coole and Frost (2010) note, to imagine matter as inherently passive is to breed the very dualisms that shatter new mate- rialism’s monism. Coole and Frost trace this conception of matter—all too common in their view—to seventeenth-century thinkers like Descartes and Newton. The Cartesian–Newtonian view sees matter “as extended, ­uniform, and inert,” as made up of “solid, bounded objects that occupy space and whose movements or behaviors are predictable, controllable, and replicable because they obey fundamental and invariable laws of motion” (Coole and Frost 2010, 7, 8). If this matter moves at all it does so not because some inherent force or sensitivity drives it along but because something external knocks against it. And yet, as Coole and Frost go on to note, the “corol- lary of this calculable natural world was not, as one might have expected, a determinism that renders human agency an illusion but a sense of mastery bequeathed to the thinking subject” (8). In other words, because matter is imagined as inert, passive, and static, the human subject along with human culture is charged with “making sense of nature by measuring and classify- ing it from a distance but also … manipulat[ing] and reconfigur[ing] matter on an unprecedented scale” (8). In this sense, dualism results as much from a certain conception of matter as it does from (perhaps more familiar) argu- ments concerning the unique capacities of incorporeal souls, divine minds, and human culture. By the end of their introduction, then, Coole and Frost (2010) have clearly drawn battle lines. On one side is inert, passive matter; the sort of substance Plastic Matters 67 that creates divisions by necessitating the existence of some exogenous force (usually a human or divine being) capable of acting upon matter’s passivity. On the other side is vital, active matter; the sort of substance that, since it evinces the same capacities we usually attribute solely to humans (or human culture), can mend monism. According to the new materialists, the modern inheritors of Cartesian–Newtonian passive matter theories are not only, as we might expect, scientists and engineers who seek to control and manipu- late the natural world, but also the humanists who, by focusing entirely on culture and language to the detriment of the non-human world, continu- ally treat matter as, at best, a passive surface upon which cultural codes are inscribed or, at worst, an imaginative construct of those same codes.3 Humanist scholarship “that presumes matter’s passivity or plasticity in the face of [socio-cultural] power may echo an earlier ontology for which mat- ter is inert stuff awaiting cultural imprint” (Coole and Frost 2010, 26). Arrayed against these forces, of course, is the new materialism, a move- ment that seeks to break the humanities’ single-minded focus on language and culture by reorienting it towards a view of vital, active, generative, or creative matter.4 Once one has granted matter’s inherent activity, the dual- ist image of human beings as creatures uniquely capable of understanding, manipulating, and mastering passive substance loses its grip. “Instead, the human species,” write Coole and Frost is, “relocated within a natural envi- ronment whose material forces themselves manifest certain agentic capacities and in which the domain of unintended or unanticipated effects is consider- ably broadened” (10). In even more striking language, Stacey Alaimo and Susan Hekman (2008) remind us that “nature ‘punches back’ at humans and the machines they construct to explore it in ways that we cannot pre- dict” (7). In this broader, more conceptual sense, “active” does not simply denominate matter’s liveliness or its capacity for self-movement or inherent creativity (although various new materialists will emphasize precisely those qualities). On the contrary, matter is “active,” in this more fundamental way, when it behaves as an agent in a network of other entities and forces. The new materialism, inspired primarily by the work of Deleuze, Latour, and Haraway, can only push for a “flat” or “horizontal” ontology, for the recognition of “assemblages” that contain and indeed confuse both natural and cultural agents, if matter is “active.”5 It’s precisely in this sense that an “active” conception of matter entails monism. If matter is imagined other- wise, if it is figured, for example, as a passive surface upon which human culture plays, then our ontology would be bifurcated, with certain elements serving as real actors (human culture) while others (non-human nature) fade into the background. This essay rejects the terms of this battle. It does so by cultivating an antipathy to the opposition Coole and Frost (among other new material- ists) set up. I side neither with proponents of a dead, passive matter, which divides willful human subjects from inert material objects, nor with those who advocate for a lively, active matter, which discloses a monist cosmos 68 Keiser populated by vibrant, agentic substances. Instead, I want to explore the resources afford by a “plastic” conception of matter—a matter, I’ll argue, that cuts across the aforementioned passive/active divide, as it is conceptual- ized in new materialist thought. In doing so, I celebrate the new material- ists’ challenge to take non-human nature seriously, to treat it as an “agent” capable of surprising effects and worthy of study. Nevertheless, I break with the new materialism on a key point: I reject its insistence on “flat” or “horizontal” ontologies, its drive to array actants in assemblages or net- works where nature and culture lose their distinction. The problem with such ontologies is that we end up explaining away, rather than properly explicating, the evident differences between “first nature” (understood as biophysical matter) and “second nature” (understood as the “normative” realm of discursive practices, social codes, and cultural rituals).6 But, as the philosopher John McDowell (1996) rightly notes, it is a mistake “to for- get that nature includes second nature” (xx). To be clear, explaining how nature includes second nature is no easy task. We must clarify how the first nature of biophysical matter somehow denaturalizes itself, thereby produc- ing a supplementary second nature that is functionally, though not substan- tively, autonomous from its physical ground. Put in more abstract terms: we need to demonstrate how monism not only generates but tolerates internal rifts or antagonisms. My small contribution to this immense task will be to show how the concept of “plasticity” can aid us in imagining a nature that somehow makes room for culture. Among contemporary thinkers, Catherine Malabou, in her various writings on “plasticity,” best explains the importance of this seemingly innocuous idea. As Malabou (2005) notes, “plasticity” contains within it a conceptual tension:

“Plastic,” as an adjective, means two things: on the one hand, to be “sus- ceptible to changes of form” or malleable (clay is a “plastic” material); and on the other hand, “having the power to bestow form, the power to mould,” as in the expressions, “plastic surgeon” and “plastic arts.” (8)

Put more simply: to be plastic is to be “at once capable of receiving and of giving form” (8). Even in the relatively abstract terms Malabou employs here, we can see that “plastic” matter shares both passive and active char- acteristics. At times, it behaves like a passive substance, since a plastic thing must be shaped by an exogenous force or will. At other moments, though, it’s closer to active matter, since it not only resists external impositions but also insists on imparting a shape of its own. In other words, plastic matter behaves as an inscriptive surface even as it “punches back.” Plasticity’s importance for the sort of materialism I’ve advocated above— a materialism that can accommodate antagonistic first and second natures— is clearest when we consider a particular example of it at work. For much Plastic Matters 69 of the twentieth century (and even longer as I’ll soon argue), neuroscientists have described the brain as plastic. Here, too, Malabou is great help in teas- ing out the significance of this simple idea. Malabou (2008) explains that the plastic brain isn’t entirely determined by preexisting genetic codes, thereby cutting it off from the shaping influences of experience (5). Nevertheless, the brain is not infinitely malleable in the face of new experience; if this were the case, no single or stable pattern would stick, and the experience “sculpt- ing” it would never be retained long enough to influence future thought. What Malabou’s distinction make clear, then, is that the concept of plastic- ity wavers between two extremes: a “rigidity” that would cut off the brain from the influence of mental and socio-cultural experience (since the men- tal phenomena generated by the nervous system would be predetermined wholly by biological presets) and a “flexibility” that would rob the organ of its own forming capacities (since no pattern would be retained long enough to influence future thought).7 Once again, we can see how Malabou’s con- ception of plasticity troubles the binary between passive and active matter. On the one hand, the plastic matter of the brain is precisely “inert stuff await[ing] cultural imprint.” Because it is not “rigid,” the brain requires exogenous experiential and cultural inscriptions. On the other hand, the plastic brain sometimes manifests the “active” capacities that resist such inscription. Because it is not “flexible,” the brain only stubbornly yields to imprinting. More importantly, we also can see how the plastic brain sup- ports a materialism of first and second natures. The brain is a natural organ that is open to denaturalization insofar as it is sculpted by culturally medi- ated experience. Nevertheless, thanks to its rigidity, the brain resists com- plete denaturalization. In this respect, it becomes a point where the struggle between first and second nature plays out. This chapter considers the consequences of this struggle for materialist thought. It breaks into two distinct sections. The first section is historical, and, like Sarah Ellenzweig’s and Charles T. Wolfe’s contributions to this volume, it seeks to complicate the account of seventeenth- and eighteenth- century matter theories passed down in current scholarship. I argue that Descartes himself, along with the Newtonian David Hartley, understood the nervous system as plastic rather than simply passive. By demonstrating that Descartes and Hartley anticipate later, more explicitly “plastic” accounts of the brain in the work of William James and Donald O. Hebb, I uncover a tradition that consistently confounds the distinction between passive and active matter, and, in doing so, makes room for the struggle of first and second natures which interests me.8 The second section considers the work of the contemporary philosopher Adrian Johnston. Although Johnston has engaged with the writings of certain new materialists (most notably Jane Bennett and William Connolly), he rejects their “flat” ontologies in favor of a system that can accommodate the stuff of mind and culture in a material- ist system, without lapsing into the strong dualisms of social constructiv- ism or Cartesian substance ontology. He, too, looks to neuroplasticity as 70 Keiser an empirical support for his views. If plasticity combines both active and ­passive accounts of matter, then, he explains, we must reckon with the fact that, at moments, the “first nature” of physical matter really does receive imprint from a mindful or cultural “second nature.” Nevertheless, Johnston takes seriously the danger that, in imagining matter as a mere receptacle for cultural or mental contents, we risk installing a dualism that grants sole agency to one side of the divide over the other. The trick, then, is to some- how reconcile a seeming dualism (between matter and mind, nature and culture) with the demands of monism. We’ll remember that in Coole and Frost’s important introduction, René Descartes serves as the ideal foil for the new materialist’s conception of matter, agency, and ontology. For the aforementioned new materialists, Descartes’ greatest sin isn’t only that he continually describes matter as “extended, uniform, and inert”; it’s that, in doing so, he summons an incor- poreal presence (the human soul) that possesses the agency which brute, dead, and passive matter otherwise lacks. At first glance, Descartes’ most thorough account of human physiol- ogy, his Treatise of Man, exemplifies this dynamic. In that work—written in the 1630s but not published until the 1660s—Descartes maintains that the rational soul experiences the external world through ideas carved upon the pineal gland. In my brief summary, it would seem that Descartes treats matter here as entirely passive, since it serves as a medium through which the incorporeal soul experiences the world. Nevertheless, in the follow- ing pages, I’ll complicate this common reading of Descartes by pointing to aspects of his neurophysiology that cannot be captured by the passive/active dichotomy that appears so frequently in new materialist writing. My goal isn’t to demonstrate that Cartesian neurophysiology is somehow secretly vitalist but rather that it is “plastic”—a term that, as we saw, embraces both active and passive aspects of matter, aspects evident even in this “mechanis- tic” account of mind and body. Before attending to plasticity, though, it’s worth briefly surveying Descartes’ neurophysiological theories, since, as I mentioned above, they are far more complex than brief accounts usually let on.9 Descartes con- tends that when an external object (e.g., a ray of light) impinges upon the back of the eye, the optic nerve stretching from the eye to the pineal gland will then be pulled and hence enlarged. After this, “animal spirits”—bits of refined, particulate matter which are pushed past the pineal gland thanks to the pumping heart—are impelled into the now widened nerve.10 In doing so, these animal spirits leave a trace upon the pineal gland. The resulting inscription mirrors both the figure in the eye and the external object that set this process in motion. In sum: sensory stimuli actuate the nerves; the nerves open; the animal spirits leave a trace of their fleeting movements upon the pineal as they are pushed into openings. The process is simple but the outcome­ is immense: the incorporeal soul can interact with the external world from its place within the pineal gland. As Descartes (1972) explains, Plastic Matters 71 the animal spirits’ inscriptions “should be taken to be ideas, that is to say, to be the forms or images that the rational soul will consider directly when … it will imagine or will sense any object” (86). So far my account of Treatise of Man accords with the new material- ists’ depiction of Cartesian philosophy as a dualist system erected upon the foundation of dead matter. The only entity here that has any real autonomy, after all, is the incorporeal soul, which can imagine or sense the external world as it pleases thanks to the handiwork of the animal spirits. Everything else—that is to say everything material—persists in an implacable circuit of cause and effect. But this only tells half the story. Things become more complicated—and the easy distinction between active and passive matter less clear—when Descartes details memory. Remember again how images appear to the mind. Once a certain set of nerves open, animal spirits enter these passages and, as a byproduct, produce an inscription upon the pineal gland—an inscription that the soul will interpret as an image or idea. When the spirits first rush past the pineal gland into enlarged nerves, they do so with some difficulty. Over time, however, the spirits “are forceful enough to enlarge these intervals [in the nerves] somewhat and to bend and rear- range any filaments they encounter” (Descartes 1972, 88). The animal spir- its’ ability to enter particular passages in the brain becomes “increasingly effective in … that their action is stronger, or lasts longer, or is more often repeated” (88). In effect, certain nerves “remain open even” in the absence of the external objects. Hence, the animal spirits’ steady loosening of these openings allows us to retain memories. However, if certain nerves are more likely to open, or remain open, thanks to repeated use, then corresponding images will appear before the mind, even though there is no external force actuating this process. In the case of memory, matter dictates the appearance of mental images. For example, Descartes (1972) explains that, at times, the enlargement of par- ticular sets of nerves will impose an image on the mind “as if by chance and without the memory of them being excited by an object impinging on the senses” (96). Even those memories the mind actively seeks out have an involuntary nature to them thanks to the disposition of the nerves and the mechanisms of mental association. “[T]he recollection of one thing can be excited by that of another which was imprinted in the memory at the same time. For example, if I see two eyes with a nose, I at once imagine a forehead and a mouth and all the other parts of a face” (90). This happens because the nerves that correspond to the images of “eyes” and “nose” (call them “a” and “b”) often open with the nerves corresponding to “forehead” and “mouth”(“c” and “d”): “if one were merely to reopen some [nerves], like a and b, that fact alone could cause others like c and d to reopen at the very same time, especially if they all had been opened several times together and had not customarily been opened separately” (90). In other words, because a ­particular sequence of nerves habitually opens together, we have no choice but to recall certain strings of associated mental images. In this instance, 72 Keiser matter, rather than mind, dictates the course of our thoughts. In extreme instances, the brain can even make us see images that have no real-world counterpart. Curiously Descartes attributes the creation of such images not to the creative genius of the incorporeal soul but to the random flux of mat- ter. If two sensory images “are traced in this same region of the brain almost equally perfectly … the spirits will acquire a [combined] impression of them all. … It is thus that chimeras and hypogryphs [sic] are formed in the imagi- nations of those who daydream, that is to say who let their fancy wander listlessly here and there without external objects diverting it and without the fancy’s being directed by reason” (96). In Descartes’ account of memory (involuntary, associative, and wholly imagined) we encounter “active” matter (in the new materialists’ sense). Remember that, for the new materialist, matter doesn’t need to be conven- tionally living or organic to be considered “lively.” Inorganic matter (such as atoms) and even inanimate artifacts (such as trash) can be considered “active” so long as it is “self-creative, productive, unpredictable,” so long as it manifests “agentic capacities [that produce] a domain of unintended and unanticipated effects” (Coole and Frost 2010, 9, 10). And once the nerve fib- ers in the Cartesian brain begin to open of their own accord—thereby gener- ating involuntary associative memories or even wholly fantastic images—we are dealing with active, agentic matter. We witness matter’s productive and creative potential in the brain’s ability to produce chimeras from received sense experience. Likewise, matter’s capacity to give rise to “unpredicta- ble,” “unintended and unanticipated effects”—effects that, in other words, defy the mind’s control—is evident in its associative mechanisms. In this instance—a reversal of the clear priority Descartes affords the incorporeal, rational soul—matter directs thought; the soul cannot help but view a cer- tain string of images because the nerves drive the order of these imaginings. It will be disputed that what I’m calling “active” matter—nerves that open of their own accord and thereby determine thought—is only active because at one point it was passive. That is, the nerves were made active by the recurrence of sensory stimuli; they manifest “agentic capacities” only because they were, at one point, capable of being molded and enlarged by external forces. But this objection nicely illustrates my larger point. If even in the Cartesian account of the brain, a supposed exemplar of the dualism the new materialists inveigh against, we can locate both passive, imprinted matter and active, agentic substance, then we require a more capacious account of material things. I’ve argued that “plastic” matter, and in par- ticular neuro-plastic matter, serves as an ideal alternative, since the plastic has the ability to take on form passively (i.e., it can serve as a receptacle for exogenous experience) and give form actively (i.e., it can shape and direct thought). To be sure, with Descartes’ Treatise of Man, we are far off from contemporary accounts of neuroplasticity. Nevertheless, we can discern the outlines of more modern accounts of neuroplasticity in Descartes’ work. Descartes makes it clear that, in the plastic brain, passivity and activity Plastic Matters 73 are simply two moments in a process. At first, brain matter is passive; it is molded by an external agent, like certain nerves opening due to sensory stimulus. Over time, however, the mere repetition of this process grants matter habits and dispositions; certain sets of nerves are more likely to open together, as they have in the past. Finally, passive matter, endowed with a kind of memory, shades into an active agent; we cannot help but imagine an entire face, even when we think only of a set of eyes, since our brain forces such images upon us. As Sarah Ellenzweig explains in her more thor- ough examination of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century matter theories in this volume, for thinkers like Descartes “matter exists along a continuum of relative activity and passivity” (4). And, in fact, we’ll see this dynamic repeated in a host of thinkers, though the precise mechanisms of matter will be different in each case. Passivity passes into activity thanks to time, repeti- tion, and memory. Published about a hundred years after the appearance of Descartes’ Treatise of Man, David Hartley’s Observations on Man makes this plas- tic dynamic even starker by significantly expanding upon the Cartesian account of memory and mental association. Moreover, Hartley considers something neglected by Descartes: the manner in which culture or “second nature” shapes and molds the brain. For Hartley, as for Descartes, it is in the nature of brain matter to associate or link together certain trains of thought. In other words, for Hartley, the brain doesn’t only receive form from the external world, it also actively works on those received forms and imposes new form in turn on the mind. Additionally, Hartley emphasizes that the forms we receive from the external world are mediated by culture and social institutions. Hartley attributes the brain’s associative abilities to certain (active) capacities in matter first delineated by Newton. Although Coole and Frost portray Newtonian matter as essentially “predictable, controllable, and rep- licable,” answerable to simple laws of cause and effect, Hartley (1749)— drawing in particular on Newton’s theory of a “subtle and elastic Fluid” which pervades both “the Pores of gross Bodies” and “the open Spaces that are void of gross Matter”—argues that matter, thanks precisely to its “aetheric” qualities, possesses powers it otherwise would lack in a more clockwork world (13). “[T]he Attractions of Gravitation and Cohesion, the Attractions and Repulsions of electrical Bodies, the mutual Influences of Bodies and Light upon each other, the Effects and Communication of Heat, and the Performance of animal Sensation and Motion”—all are thanks to Newton’s “aether” (13). Hartley’s elastic, pulsing, electrical substance serves as another example of the general tendency, delineated by Charles T. Wolfe in this volume, for matter theories in the eighteenth century to take “an increasing diversity and density of properties” (5). The importance of these “aetheric” qualities are particularly evident when Hartley explains how ideas are retained in the brain. Unlike Descartes, who imagines that experience is literally carved onto the brain by animal 74 Keiser spirits rushing out of the pineal gland, Hartley contends that ideas are sim- ply patterns of vibration captured in cerebral substance. As Hartley (1749) notes, “when external Objects are impressed on the sensory Nerves, they excite Vibrations in the Aether residing in the Pores of these Nerves, by means of the mutual Actions interceding between the Objects, Nerves, and Aether” (21). While the resulting vibration eventually vanishes, a continual repetition of certain sense-impressions (and resulting vibrations) can take on “a more permanent Nature” (57). In other words, the substance of the brain, once it has been vibrating a certain way long enough, will reproduce and reinforce that vibratory state. But such vibrations never reproduce the external world perfectly. Vibrations “diffuse” into those parts of the brain where they don’t belong. Vibrations, in other words, are always spilling out of their designated places, running out of their proper tracks, and combining within the folds of the brain in order to produce novel associations and even create new thoughts. This happens, according to Hartley, simply because repetition eventually leads to new mental dispositions:

Since the Vibrations A and B are impressed together, they must, from the Diffusion necessary to vibratory Motions, run into one Vibration; and consequently, after a Number of Impressions sufficiently repeated, will leave a Trace, or Miniature, of themselves, as one Vibration, which will recur every now-and-then, from slight Causes. (70)

In Hartley’s system, then, we witness another instance of the same plastic process we encountered in Descartes. A “passive” brain becomes “active” through the repeated imposition of exogenous stimuli. The brain passively receives external stimuli, but in doing so it actively reworks those stimuli, forging new ideas and trains of thought in the process. Once enough vibra- tions have joined themselves together in the mind, one cannot help but fol- low certain trains of thought or see complex ideas where simpler ones once stood distinct. While for Descartes matter’s ability to lead along the mind often seemed like a danger, for Hartley we simply wouldn’t have complex ideational lives if vibrations didn’t actively link together and determine thought. Hartley adds something else to the plastic dynamic Descartes describes. Whereas Descartes concentrated on simple sensory stimuli (e.g., light impinging upon the optic nerves) in his account of neurophysiology, Hartley considers the impact of more complicated and abstract cultural forms on the brain’s physical nature. Hartley’s Observations begins by focusing on the neurophysiology of sensation, memory, and association. But by its con- clusion, the scope of the Observations has widened, with Hartley tackling­ language, art, morality, politics, and theology. Along the way, Hartley sur- veys the mechanisms by which cultural objects (e.g., art, poetry, philosophy) Plastic Matters 75 and social institutions (e.g., the family, religion, the state) shape our asso- ciations and, in doing so, play upon the vibrations captured in the body’s cerebral folds. In fact, Hartley speaks with evident alarm about the need for various authority figures to manage and control the associations of children. For example, “the principal Duty” of parents, he writes, “is the giving a right Education, or the imprinting such Associations upon the Minds of Children, as may conduct them safe through the Labyrinths of this World to a happy Futurity” (302). If the brain were entirely “passive”—if cul- ture could stamp its commands upon the organ without fear of alteration or imperfection—the parent’s task would be easy. But, Hartley warns, the parent must not “flatter himself, that his Child’s Nature is not so degen- erate and corrupt as to require frequent Corrections and Restraints, with perpetual Encouragements and Incentives to Virtue by Reward, Example, Advice, Books, Conversation, & c.” (302). After all, as we have seen, there is something “active,” obstinate, and unruly in the human brain, something within otherwise passive brain matter itself that transforms the copying of exogenous experience into an opportunity to generate confused ideas and unexpected associations. The best we can hope for in the case of education and enculturation, Hartley advises, is somehow to anticipate and channel the force of these associations by linking together the feeling of gratifica- tion with high-minded virtues. As Hartley explains, with a note of fearful resignation, the

principal End and Difficulty of Life is to generate such moderate, varying, and perpetually actuating Motives [for Love, Compassion, Generosity, etc.], by means of the natural sensible Desires being asso- ciated with, and parceled out upon foreign Objects, as may keep up a State of moderate Chearfulness, and useful Employment, during the whole Course of our Lives. (302)

We find William James, writing more than one hundred years after Hartley, refining these neurophysiological theories. In a chapter on mental “habit” in his textbook Principles of Psychology, James seems to have become the first person to explicitly describe the brain as “plastic.” How exactly does the mind acquire mental habits, he wonders, such that certain trains of thought become automatic? To attain and retain habits, James (1950) notes, brain matter must “be plastic enough to maintain its integrity, and be not disrupted when its structure yields” (104). In sum, the brain must pos- sess “a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once” (105).11 As in the work of Descartes and Hartley, James’ plastic brain combines aspects of both passive and active matter; and like his predecessors, James treats “passive” and “active” not as opposed kinds of matter but rather as two states in an unfolding process. First, the brain must be understood as a passive surface in need of inscription. For 76 Keiser James, the “hemispherical cortex shows itself be … peculiarly susceptible” to “the ­currents that pour in through … the sensory nerve-roots” (107). As he goes on to explain, “the currents, once in, must find a way out. In get- ting out they leave their traces in the paths which they take … paths which do not easily disappear” (107). Second, because these paths “do not easily disappear,” they eventually become more permanent features, tracks that future thoughts are more likely to follow: “A path once traversed by a nerve- current might be expected to follow the law of most of the paths we know, and to be scooped out and made more permeable than before … So nothing is easier than to imagine how, when a current once has traversed a path, it should traverse it more readily still a second time” (108). Finally, James will argue that the brain, cut through with traces of past sensory experience, becomes more “active,” insofar as it determines our thoughts rather than simply being determined by them. In essence, many of our mental and bod- ily habits are spurred on by “nerve-currents” following well-worn paths in the brain. James (1950) maintained that he could not “in anything like a minute or definite way” explain the “mechanical facts” underlying habit. His talk of currents traversing the brain and leaving marks in their path was ulti- mately an informed analogy: “[O]ur usual scientific custom of interpreting hidden molecular events after the analogy of visible massive ones enables us to frame easily an abstract and general scheme of processes which the physi- cal changes in question may be like” (107). The underlying neurological mechanisms that James posited (but remained uncertain about) were argu- ably first explicated by Donald O. Hebb in his 1949 work The Organization of Behavior. In the decades between James’ Principles of Psychology and Hebb’s work, advances in microscopy and staining techniques allowed sci- entists to expose and study the workings of discrete brain cells or neurons.12 Based on these findings, Hebb proposed that experience could be encoded in the nervous system through the interactions of distinct neurons. The result- ing theory is often referred to as Hebb’s rule, and, in its somewhat simplified form (which Hebb himself did not use) it reads as follows: “Cells that fire together wire together.”13 In order to understand Hebb’s rule a few brief, and very general, remarks about the neuron are required.14 Branching off from the central cell body of the neuron are two kinds of nerve fibers: axons and dendrites. For the purposes of our very general overview, we can think of axons as “output” fibers, and dendrites as “inputs.” For example, two neurons (let’s call them A and B) are connected when the axon from neuron A nearly touches the dendrite of neuron B. Note the “nearly”; axons and dendrites do not inter- act directly. Instead, a small gap—the synapse—stands between the two cells. Nevertheless, signals can travel across the synaptic gap, effectively linking axons and dendrites. Again speaking very generally, when an electri- cal charge has traversed a neuron and reached its axon, a chemical, called a neurotransmitter, will flood the synapse where it is then “received” by Plastic Matters 77 the dendrite of another neuron. The axon in neuron A can send one of two electrochemical signals to the dendrite in neuron B. An excitatory signal from neuron A will make neuron B “fire”; that is, neuron B, incited by the electrochemical signals feeding into its “input” dendrite, will discharge yet another signal through its own “output” axon. An inhibitory signal will have the opposite effect; if the neuron receives this sort of signal, then it will be less likely to discharge a signal of its own. To these rather simple mechanics, Hebb added another: if neuron A con- sistently “fires” neuron B, then it will be more likely to do so over time. As Hebb (1949) himself explains: “When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A’s efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased” (62). When we say that neurons “wire” together, we refer to this increase in firing “effi- ciency” between two cells. Moreover, as Hebb notes, this firing efficiency is ultimately grounded in physiological changes: “The assumption, in brief, is that a growth process accompanying synaptic activity makes the synapse more readily traversed” (60). When Hebb wrote these words in 1949, he was working on a hunch. Subsequent research proved him right. When the dendrite in neuron B receives an excitatory signal from neuron A, it releases proteins called “neurotrophins” (LeDoux 2003, 81). Neurotrophins sustain and encourage cell growth. Thanks to these proteins, the synaptic connec- tions between firing neurons not only survive but thrive as new links grow between the cells. Hence, all of this new “wiring” increases the chances of two neurons “firing.” Hebb (1949) himself recognized that his “rule” provided some mod- ern support for a long-standing, though shakily understood, concept. “The general idea is an old one, that any two cells or systems of cells that are repeatedly active at the same time will tend to become ‘associated,’ so that activity in one facilitates activity in the other” (70). And to be sure, we’ve seen Descartes, Hartley, and James point to a similar dynamic: all three thinkers continually stress that, given repeated stimuli, an otherwise “pas- sive” nervous system eventually develops more “active” associations or habits. Cells that fire together—or open together or vibrate together or are traversed by the same nerve-current together—wire together. Nevertheless, since Hebb was the first to posit how associative mechanisms might work on the level of the neuron, his theory—sometimes referred to as Hebbian plasticity or Hebbian learning—became the basis for further research into neuroplasticity. Joseph LeDoux (2003) describes the implications of this work more generally:

Most systems of the brain are plastic, that is, modifiable by experience, which means that the synapses involved are changed by experience. … Plasticity in all the brain’s systems is an innately determined ­characteristic. This may sound like a nature-nurture contradiction, but it is not. An 78 Keiser innate capacity for synapses to record and store information is what allows systems to encode experience. … All learning, in other words, depends on the operation of genetically programmed capacities to learn. Learning involves the nurturing of nature. (9)15

As LeDoux’s summary implies, neuroplasticity forces us to reconsider not only the passive/active matter binary that grounds the new material- ism. It also forces us to reconceptualize the relationship between nature and nurture, the biophysical matter, or first nature, of the nervous system and the codes, mores, thoughts, and fantasies, or second nature, of the cul- tural realm. If this is the case, though, then we need a materialism that can take seriously the relative autonomy of the social, cultural, and linguistic realms without also abandoning its commitment to a monism that resists hierarchical bifurcations.

***

I want to temporarily depart from my condensed and rushed history of neu- roplasticity—with its reflections on the “active” and “passive” aspects of plastic matter—in order to consider the more wide-ranging consequences of this concept. To do that I turn to the work of Adrian Johnston—a thinker who, though engaged with the same problems and questions as many of the new materialists, nevertheless approaches these matters in an entirely dif- ferent way.16 Johnston interests me for two reasons. First, Johnston clearly and forcefully articulates the philosophical implications of neuroplasti- city. Although he certainly is not alone in this respect—the work of Paul Churchland (1989, 129–35) in analytic philosophy and that of Johnston’s collaborator Catherine Malabou in continental philosophy spring to mind (Johnston and Malabou 2013)—he nevertheless puts greater emphasis on the very aspects of neuroplasticity I’ve been tracing in the previous pages. He focuses on the plastic brain as a site that both generates and sustains the rift between first and second natures. Second, as Johnston’s interest in the “denaturalized nature” of the plastic brain indicates, his project advances claims that accord with but also chal- lenge the new materialism. Like the new materialists, Johnston advocates monism; all that exists is natural, physical substance. For Johnston, there is not some other entity—some supernatural, immaterial thing—hovering above or outside the material realm. However, breaking with the new mate- rialism, Johnston (2014) maintains that while only matter exists, we must also reckon with the reality of a second nature: the cultural, historical, lin- guistic, and social realm. The challenge of Johnston’s materialism, then, is to somehow reconcile a “flat” monism with certain “splits” or dualisms. “[W]hat kind of matter,” he asks, “can and does give rise to something that then, once arisen, seems to carve a chasm of inexplicable irreducibility Plastic Matters 79 between itself and its originary material ground/source” (Johnston 2014, 123). Put differently: Johnston asks how a single material substance can produce a bifurcation or rupture within itself, such that a “second nature” can emerge.17 Furthermore, Johnston wonders how this same material sub- stance—having generated a mindful “second nature” that is not simply or strictly determined by its physical nature—nevertheless remains open to the influence and shaping of this more-than-material offshoot. The central difference separating Johnston’s project from the new materialist’s, then, is that his risks a dualism. To be clear, in risking this dualism, Johnston does not set out to overturn the new materialism but to advance upon it. In his most explicit engagement with new materialist thinkers like William Connolly and Jane Bennett, Johnston faults the move- ment for succumbing to a “contemplative” materialism. His reference is to Marx’s (1977) first thesis on Feuerbach: “The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism … is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively” (156, qtd. Johnston 2014, 315). In Johnston’s (2014) twist on Marx’s thesis, the new materialists have not taken into account the “practice” that made possible their claims about the nature of matter. This means that they have “fail[ed] to account (onto- logically) for the (epistemological) position of contemplative reflection and enunciation from which this metaphysics is constructed and articulated” (Johnston 2014, 315–16). In other words, if the world comprises noth- ing but matter—even active matter—then how did it come to pass that certain kinds of matter were able to know and describe the world in the first place? How did the “first nature” of biophysical substance create the “second nature” of sapient knowers and their linguistically mediated con- ceptual abilities—abilities that can grasp the nature of the physical world itself? Put even more starkly: how did matter produce minds that are able to reflect upon it? Such questions ought to be, by their very nature, off the table for the most stringent advocates of various “flat” or “horizontal” ontologies, since they posit entities (sapient minds and their concepts) that are functionally, though not necessarily substantively, distinct from other sorts of natural things. In this instance, Johnston levels an epistemological critique against the new materialism. The movement, in his estimation, cannot account for the transcendental conditions justifying its wide-ranging claims about the nature of things. But this epistemological criticism—insofar as it concerns the very substance of minds, which somehow are armed with normative conceptual categories but nevertheless grounded in a non-sapient nature— shades into ontological matters. In fact, the key difference between Johnston and the new materialism concerns the nature of difference. The new mate- rialists want to replace the (in their view) ideological division between the natural world and our wholly human culture with networks, assem- blages, or hybrids—“mangles” where the lines dividing nature from culture, 80 Keiser human from non-human, matter from mind are harder to discern. Johnston wants to preserve the difference, even antagonism, between nature and cul- ture, while insisting that this very difference is immanent to nature itself. Johnston’s commitment to monism also entails a version of philosophical naturalism; he insists that any phenomenon, no matter how mysterious ini- tially, will receive a natural explanation in the last analysis. For Johnston, this means that the very “break” between nature and second nature can be traced to natural processes. In other words, we must be able to explain how nature itself produces the “second nature” of cultural subjects, how nature somehow denaturalizes itself. This is the most important challenge for his thought, and in struggling with it he will draw on the resources of empirical concepts like neuroplasticity. In light of this challenge, Johnston (2014) advocates the “principle of no illusions.” At its most basic level, the principle of no illusions takes seriously, by according real causal weight to, the mental and social realms. Neuroplasticity—as we have seen in our quick history—is always push- ing towards the “principle of no illusions.” After all, if mental experience, mediated as it is by the socio-cultural realm, changes the brain, then the “first nature” of the nervous system must be constitutively open to “second nature.” As Johnston (2014) puts it, “[t]he material Real itself comes to be perturbed by the fictions it secretes” (128). Johnston maintains that “words, thoughts, and fantasies … although semblances, are not mere semblances as inconsequential fictions” (70). Human beings specifically are readily parasitized by extraordinarily complex cultural codes that, insofar as they precede and exceed any particular physical body, are arguably autonomous from simple material substance. Given this, Johnston argues that material- ism needs to “account for the fact that symbolico-linguistically mediated structures and phenomena indeed do take on lives of their own, coming to be as real as anything presumed to be entirely asubjective” (78). The principle of no illusions dictates that socio-linguistic structures and mental imagery have as much impact on us as brute physiology. Any materialism hoping to be “complete”—and not merely dismissive of difficult phenom- ena—would need to account not only for how the mind (and socio-cultural reality more generally) could arise from matter, but also how that “second nature,” having attained some measure of autonomy from its purely bio- physical ground, could influence and transform matter in turn. And for Johnston, this signals in turn that materialist philosophy must take account of neuroplasticity. More generally, it must understand matter not simply as an “active” force that works to its own ends, but at times as a “passive” surface, since “the brain and body are shaped by and shot through with more-than-biological (i.e., cultural, historical, linguistic, social, etc.) medi- ating influences” (61). Before returning to neuroplasticity, though, it’s important to explicate more thoroughly Johnston’s conception of nature and culture. I mentioned above that he often depicts nature and culture as persisting in a state of Plastic Matters 81 tension or antagonism with one another. Consider, for example, Johnston’s (2013) description of the human condition:

Human beings, in terms of where they stand between the natural and the nonnatural, could be described as creatures of temporal torsions. Parts of human beings lag behind in the time warp of evolutionary-genetic influences linked to long-past contexts, whereas other parts, which can and do come into conflict with these same evolutionary-genetic influ- ences, take shape according to faster-moving historical temporalities. … Such beings are the products of incomplete, partial denaturalizations failing to eliminate without undigested leftovers the vestiges of things other than the sociosymbolically mediated structures and phenomena of human history both phylogenetic and ontogenetic. (173)

In other words, we are beings riven by conflicting drives and pressures. Some of those drives are natural: the “leftovers” of bodies and brains produced by our genetic inheritance and adaptive, evolutionary pressures. Others are cultural: the relatively new strictures of our socio-symbolic world. As Johnston explains, human beings persist in the gap generated by the struggle between nature and culture. We are “stranded, as malformed Frankenstein- like jumbles of mismatched fragments thrown together over the course of unsynchronized sequences of aleatory events, halfway between nature and culture, between the lingering adaptations of evolutionary histories and those demanded by human histories past and present” (183). It must be stressed that, in Johnston’s vision of the human as an inherently conflicted being, neither nature nor culture holds sway. Instead, our so-called natu- ral instincts are overwritten, channeled, and shaped by non-natural cultural forces. But never completely. Such “denaturalizations” are hopelessly partial and imperfect; they always leave some vestige of nature behind as a remain- der or excess. The result, as Johnston puts it, is “a sedimentary accumula- tion, a layering of heterogeneous montages of often conflicting dimensions running the gamut from the relatively ‘natural’ (e.g., evolutionary tenden- cies rooted in archaic environmental contexts) to the relatively ‘nonnatural’ (primarily sociohistorical factors and variables past and present)” (172). Johnston’s insistence that nature and culture persist in a state of conflict— with nature never shirking off cultural norms and culture never domesticat- ing the dictates of nature—means that he rejects both natural determinism (e.g., humans are the puppets of genetic codes) and social constructivism (e.g., social codes, not genetic ones, pull our strings). To be clear, Johnston certainly thinks we are determined by inhuman systems (both natural and cultural) beyond our control. But he maintains that the systems determining us work at cross-purposes.18 In his (2014) terminology, nature and culture are not “strong” but “weak” forces. What would it mean for a system like nature or culture to be “weak” or, conversely, “strong”? We imagine that 82 Keiser something is “strong” when we figure it “as an inescapable, all-powerful tyrant” (Johnston 2014, 150). For example, if nature really were such a tyrant, then the result would be a form of “epiphenomenal materialism.” Epiphenomenalism would discount, by making causally ineffective, the stuff of second nature: everything from the mental world (e.g., dreams, fantasies, emotions, beliefs) to the extra-personal socio-cultural realm (e.g., discursive practices, social codes, ideological formations, shared rituals, cultural arti- facts). A “strong” nature would relegate mind and culture to shadows cast by the more substantial stuff of biophysical matter. According to this view, culture—the beliefs, emotions, rituals, and social institutions that appear to work upon our minds and drive our beings—in fact carries no weight. It is rather material substance and its steel laws alone that really determine our lives. Importantly, the same analysis would hold true of a “strong” cul- ture, although in this instance cultural norms, rather than natural impulses, would determine us absolutely. Against the aforementioned vision of a “strong, tyrannical” nature (or culture), Johnston—drawing explicitly from the work of philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright—proposes “weak” alternatives.19 For Johnston, “weakness” isn’t some wholly abstract metaphysical principle; rather, the term points to concrete, empirical findings about the nature of matter (and in particular the nature of biological matter). In fact, the plasticity of the nervous system frequently serves as the privileged example of a “weak” nature in Johnston’s sense. For instance, here is how Johnston (2014) glosses Hebb’s findings:

[S]tarting with such mid-twentieth-century scientific breakthroughs as Donald O. Hebb’s research on the psycho-physiological mechanisms of learning, the biological sciences have managed to “weaken” empirically their image of (human) nature… . Through this self-induced weaken- ing, empirical, experimental studies of the living material foundations of humanity have given us, in forms like neuroplasticity and epigenetics, the wiggle room we need and want for a materialist ontology of freedom. (159)

How exactly is neuroplasticity an example of “weak” nature? Moreover, how does this concept lead to a “materialist ontology of freedom,” and what would that entail exactly? Simply put: if the brain is open to inscription by “mental phenomena,” there is no tyrannical biological law determining its activities in the last instance. Whereas the “strong” nature of an epiphe- nomenal materialism “admits solely a unidirectional flow of causal influence from matter to mind,” Johnston’s “weak” nature, manifested particularly in neuroplasticity, points to a more complicated causal dynamic. The matter of the plastic brain determines mental life (since thought is partially the result of synaptic connections), even as it is determined by that same mental life (since experience physically changes those connections). To this end, Hebb’s Plastic Matters 83 rule mandates a kind of lawlessness in the nervous system: “The brain is genetically programmed to be open and receptive to reprogramming … through learning experiences in relation to the contextual vicissitudes of exogenous contingencies. This determined lack of determination, this pre- programming for reprogramming, is an important aspect of what is meant by characterizing the brain as ‘plastic’” (Johnston 2013, 31). We can emphasize the importance of neuroplasticity for Johnston’s phi- losophy if we consider his most direct engagement with its workings. Citing neuroscientists like Joseph LeDoux and Jean-Pierre Changeux, as well as neuro-psychoanalysts like Gerard Pommier, Johnston describes the impor- tance of neuroplasticity in early childhood development and, in particular, language acquisition. Drawing on Changeux specifically, Johnston (2013) explains that when infants first begin to interact with the world they engage “in a process of actively fantasizing, imagining, or hallucinating” their sur- roundings, thereby playing with various images or hypotheses concern- ing their environs (196). Early attempts at language work similarly, with “infantile babbling” also serving “as a type of game-playing in which a gur- gling multitude of sounds automatically are experimented with by the young subject-to-be” (196). In these early stages, the infant enjoys “an excessive, unruly freedom” that is soon tamed and domesticated by its inter-subjec- tive interactions with adult caretakers (196). For example, in the case of language, “the infant is prompted to pare down the proliferating plethora of noises of its baby tongue … so as to give voice to the narrower set of well-ordered phonemes recognized by the mother tongue … into which he/ she is being inducted” (196). In this case, the social order (embodied by adult caretakers) curbs or shapes the infant’s excessive, even chaotic, natural state. Ultimately, neuroplasticity makes this process of maturation through enculturation possible. As Johnston notes:

The initial ‘exuberance’ of an infant’s neural networks—there are more synaptic connections present in early stages of development than will be needed later by the more mature organism—is pruned down through ‘subtraction’: through the exchanges between organism and environ- ment determining which connections will be used (and, hence, will be kept) and which ones won't be used (and, hence, will be allowed to atrophy or completely wither away). (196)

Although it might not appear so at first glance, Hebb’s rule—“cells that fire together wire together”—is at play in the infant’s brain. While the wording of Hebb’s rule might imply that we only build up certain habits or trains of thought over time by “wiring” ensembles of neurons that would not other- wise “fire” together, more commonly plastic habits are formed not by gain but by loss. The excessive synaptic connections in the infant brain are pared away through disuse, through the repressions inherent in cultural formation. 84 Keiser We can abstract and generalize a few important lessons from Johnston’s account of infant enculturation—lessons that bear not only on his project more generally but also on the history of neuroplasticity I’ve traced in these pages. Note that the “first nature” in question here—the body and brain of the infant—is not a passive or inert blank slate awaiting cultural inscription. On the contrary, the infant’s brain, comprised as it is by an “exuberant” neural network, manifests an “excessive, unruly freedom” in its representa- tions of the world and in the sounds that spill from its mouth. As Johnston emphasizes, the intelligible use of language isn’t a capacity we construct from nothing—a piecemeal collecting of phonemes, words, sentences, etc.— but an ability that is molded out of or pared down from a dense, senseless surplus (196). And this phenomenon holds more generally for Johnston: the biophysical matter of first nature is excessive, restless, chaotic, and unruly. It is an “active” matter in the new materialists’ sense of that term. But if this first nature is “active,” then the second nature imposed upon it must be understood as a pacifying force. For Johnston, culture channels and dams up the unruly excesses of nature; it deadens the overflowing vitality of life. In this respect, it makes the matter of the mind “passive,” insofar as it treats that matter as a surface for cultural inscriptions. Drawing on both German Idealism (Hegel) and psychoanalysis (Lacan), Johnston (2008) fre- quently describes second nature as a “cadaverizing” force, something that fates us to a “living death,” to playing out rote social roles and undergoing rituals that precede and exceed our finite biological life. Second nature or culture for Johnston, then, is not, as we might have imagined it, a free realm where we can escape the blind dictates of nature. But it’s important to reiterate once more that Johnston does not think that denaturalization is ever absolute. We are never fully “cadaverized,” never entirely subjectified by the cultural world. To imagine otherwise would be to treat culture as a “strong” force, as an absolute tyrant that could overwrite our bodily nature completely. In terms of the brain, the plastic matter of the nervous system is never entirely “passive”; as Johnston and Malabou note, the brain is not infinitely flexible but retains some rigidity, some resistance to exogenous influence. Instead of nature or culture utterly determining us, we possess only a “sedimentary accumulation” of natural and non-natural levels—levels that are inherently conflicting and hence unstable (Johnston and Malabou 2013, 172).

Notes 1 Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (2012) also stress that monism is the pre- eminent quality of the new materialism: “[New materialism] explores a monist perspective, devoid of the dualisms that have dominated the humanities (and sciences) until today, by giving special attention to matter, which has been so neglected by dualist thought” (85). 2 In addition to Coole and Frost’s edited collection, and Dolphijn and van der Tuin’s book, see also Alaimo and Hekman 2008 for a good overview of the new materialism. Plastic Matters 85 3 For this argument see Kirby 1997, esp. 60–61, 105–108. 4 In other words, simply favoring matter over culture isn’t enough to make one a new materialist. One must also favor a certain kind of active, vital matter. In this respect, a thinker like Quentin Meillassoux is not a “new materialist,” though he also faults humanists for confining themselves to a “correlationism” that traps human beings in the prison-house of culture and language, cutting them off from the “great outdoors” of the hyper-chaotic, inhuman universe. In Meillassoux’s work, however, it is precisely Cartesian–Newtonian matter—matter that can be formalized in mathematical terms; “primary,” not “secondary,” qualities—that we can access through rational speculation (see Meillassoux 2008). 5 Jane Bennett’s important book Vibrant Matter exemplifies this argument. See especially Bennett 2010, 20–38. 6 For a more forceful version of this critique, see Brassier 2011. 7 “Rigidity” and “flexibility” are Malabou’s terms. See Malabou 2008, 5–6. 8 In an important essay that anticipates and has inspired my own, Wolfe (2016) argues that a host of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers—and in par- ticular Diderot—anticipated modern conceptions of neuroplasticity, though they did not use that term. 9 My account of both Descartes’ neurophysiology and (later in the essay) Hartley’s writings on the brain and mind owe an immense amount to John Sutton’s expli- cation of their writings. See Sutton 1998. 10 It’s important to stress that, for Descartes, this process is entirely mechanistic, that is, driven by simple dynamics of cause and effect. In order to underline this point, Descartes analogizes the body to the workings of a musical organ. The body’s “heart and arteries,” which impel the animal spirits through the cavities and nerves in the brain, are like the bellows “which push air into the [organ’s] wind trunks,” while “external objects, which, by displacing certain nerves, make spirits from the brain cavities enter certain nerves” are like the “organist’s fingers, which, by pressing certain keys, make air from the wind trunks enter certain pipes” (Descartes 1972, 71). 11 Compare James’ summary of brain plasticity to Malabou’s depiction of the brain as shuttling between “rigid” and “flexible” states; see Malabou 2008, 5–6. 12 For more on the discoveries leading up to the “neuron doctrine” see Finger 1993, 43–48. 13 The phrase originally came from the neurobiologist Carla Shatz according to Joseph LeDoux; see LeDoux 2003, 334. 14 A slightly more technical—but still general—explanation is available in LeDoux 2003, esp. 65–81. I’ve relied on LeDoux’s work in my own brief summary here. 15 To complicate matters somewhat: not all forms of neuroplasticity are “Hebbian”; that is, not all plasticity occurs through strengthening the connections between neurons. Some plasticity is “non-Hebbian” or “non-synaptic”; in this case, the firing potential of the neuron itself is altered. Moreover, when changes occur on a wide scale in the brain (such as the re-mapping of entire sensory systems in the face of a massive injury), the plasticity at issue combines various sorts of Hebbian and non-Hebbian plasticity. In this passage, LeDoux is discussing plasticity more generally. For more on neuroplasticity, see especially Churchland 1989, Wexler 2006, and Doidge 2007. 16 At its most general, Johnston seeks to synthesize the ostensibly disparate tradi- tions of psychoanalysis (especially Lacan and Zizek), German Idealism (Kant, Schelling, and Hegel), and Marxism, while demonstrating how these movements can engage with issues in contemporary philosophy and science. In other words, Johnston’s project is extraordinarily ambitious and much too complex for me to describe adequately in a few pages. To simplify my summary of Johnston’s work, I’ve tried to present his arguments without drawing on specialized lan- guage from, for example, psychoanalysis or German Idealism. 86 Keiser 17 Johnston, of course, isn’t alone in asking this question. He continually ­characterizes his own philosophy as an “emergent dual-aspect monism” (Johnston 2014, 14). The phrase encapsulates the argument I’ve detailed above: namely, that there is only thing but that two “aspects” (namely, mind and mat- ter) emerge from this substance. But to this point, Johnston also adds the “signif- icant qualification that these ‘aspects’ and their ineradicable divisions … enjoy the heft of actual existence” (14). He includes this caveat to mark his difference from other materialist-monists, such as Spinoza and Donald Davidson, whose positions, though similar to Johnston’s own in certain respects, nevertheless differ radically. In Spinoza’s philosophy, for instance, one cannot explain how thought emerged from matter (or, for that matter, how thought might causally interact with the physical world), since thought and extension are simply two ways the intellect understands the same substance. In this sense, thought and extension for Spinoza do not “enjoy the heft of actual existence,” in Johnston’s sense, since these attributes simply designate the same substance. However, Johnston wants to grant mind and matter enough independence, so that we can imagine them not simply as attributes but as separate entities simply grounded in the same substance. 18 Johnston argues that the only “freedom” we ever really experience occurs in violent irruptions when the systems determining us break down. As he notes, “[b]eing free is a transitory event arising at exceptional moments when the his- torical, psychical, and biological run of things breaks down, when the determin- ing capacities of natural and cultural systems … are temporarily suspended as a result of deadlocks and short-circuits being generated within and between these multifaceted, not-whole systems” (Johnston 2008, 286–87). 19 Johnston’s “weak” nature is inspired in part by Cartwright’s conception of a “dappled world” (see Johnston 2014, 171). For Cartwright, the world is “dap- pled” in the sense that no set of simple scientific laws can uncover a univer- sal order lurking beneath the chaotic, patchwork appearance of the world. The patchwork world is all there really is. Cartwright readily maintains that scientists produce laws, but since these laws are often created in highly controlled labora- tory settings, it doesn’t follow that such laws are universally applicable: “The point is that the claims to knowledge we can defend by our impressive scientific successes do not argue for a unified world of universal order, but rather for a dappled world of mottled objects” (Cartwright 1999, 10).

References Alaimo, Stacy and Susan J. Hekman, eds. 2008. Material Feminisms. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University. Brassier, Ray. 2011. “Concepts and Objects.” In The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, edited by Levi R. Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. Melbourne, Victoria, S. Aust.: re.press. Cartwright, Nancy. 1999. The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Churchland, Paul. 1989. A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Descartes, René. 1972. Treatise of Man. Translated by Thomas Steele Hall. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plastic Matters 87 Doidge, Norman. 2007. The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. New York: Viking. Dolphijn, Rick and Iris van der Tuin. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Finger, Stanley. 1993. Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Explorations into Brain Function. New York: Oxford University Press. Hartley, David. 1749. Observations on Man: His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations. London: printed by S. Richardson. Hebb, Donald Olding. 1949. The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory. New York: Wiley. James, William. 1950. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover Publications. Johnston, Adrian. 2008. Žižek’s Ontology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Johnston, Adrian. 2013. Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Johnston, Adrian. 2014. Adventures in Transcendental Materialism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Johnston, Adrian and Catherine Malabou. 2013. Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience. New York: Columbia University Press. Kirby, Vicki. 1997. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York: Routledge. LeDoux, Joseph. 2003. Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. New York: Penguin. Malabou, Catherine. 2005. The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic. New York: Routledge. Malabou, Catherine. 2008. What Should We Do with Our Brain? New York: Fordham University Press. Marx, Karl. 1977. “Theses on Feuerbach.” In Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDowell, John. 1996. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Meillassoux, Quentin. 2008. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. London: Continuum. Sutton, John. 1998. Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wexler, Bruce E. 2006. Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wolfe, Charles T. 2016. “Materialism and ‘the soft substance of the brain’: Diderot and plasticity.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24(5). 4 Deleuze and New Materialism Naturalism, Norms, and Ethics

Keith Ansell-Pearson Warwick University

There are two key questions we might ask of the new intellectual work around materialism: just what is new about the so-called new materialism? And, sec- ond, what role should Deleuze play in these debates about the new material- ism? In what follows I seek to show why Deleuze is important for the new materialism, but that he also bequeaths a complex legacy to contemporary thought about the human. In key work of the 1950s and 1960s, Deleuze’s texts support a rich philosophical naturalism that is also a kind of humanism (the concern is with the promotion of human emancipation and the freedom of Reason); in his collaborative work with Guattari in the 1970s his work takes on a more anti-humanist inflection and orientation (here the human is placed on a plane of immanence that strips it of its ontological privilege).1 Although it is stated by some of its proponents that new materialism is a term coined by Rosi Braidotti and Manuel de Landa (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2011, 383), this, as we shall see, overlooks the fact that in the 1960s Deleuze was using this term in connection with his reading of Spinoza.2 It is my view that it is Deleuze’s Spinozism that accounts for his complicated reception, allowing, as it does, for both humanist and anti-humanist, and even post-humanist, appropriations. Deleuze’s Spinozism allows for dif- ferent possibilities for thinking, then, and my worry is that we are being invited to opt for an anti-humanist and post-humanist position at the cost of neglecting what I regard as some important insights that Deleuze developed in his reading of Spinoza in the 1960s, notably into the ethical task of human emancipation. Although one might claim a “strategic” value for the term, rather than a “descriptive” one, as Dolphijn and van der Tuin (2012) indi- cate, key issues are at stake in the appropriation of Deleuze for the ends of a new materialism.3 Whilst it may well be the case, as Coole and Frost (2010) contend, that “thinking anew about the fundamental structure of matter has far-reaching normative and existential implications” (5), in Deleuze’s case the focus is very much on the normative and existential implications of human becomings, even when this involves the human becoming, in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) terms, animal, molecular, and imperceptible. A note on the use of “-isms.” With regard to humanism, as Beatrice Han-Pile (2010) notes, humanism is a concept that is as widely used as it is Deleuze and New Materialism 89 indeterminate. It is often, at least in the English-speaking world, associated with a view of the world that is secular and optimistic and that contends the privilege of human beings over non-organic (or organic but nonhuman) entities, “defending the rights of human beings to happiness and to the development of their individual potential” (Han-Pile 2010, 118). On the continent, especially in France and Germany, for thinkers such as Foucault, it was a dirty word, largely on account of its implied anthropocentrism. As far as I know, Deleuze never employs the word humanism or the term anti-humanism. As I will endeavor to show there are features of Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza in the 1960s that clearly align his position with elements of humanism and there are other aspects, especially the way he contin- ued to develop his Spinozism, that align his position with anti-humanism. But even here, I want to show Deleuze does not produce an ontology that refuses to recognize the differences between the human and other forms or modes of life. I shall shortly show how Deleuze conceives materialism and naturalism. For now let me note that by “naturalism” I am referring to key Spinozist- inspired moves made in modern thought, such as construing the human being as fully part of nature in which it enjoys no special metaphysical value or privileged place in the natural order. In addition, no cosmic exceptional- ism is allowed: everything in the world, be it human, animal, or mineral, plays by the same rules. Materialism is a general view about what actually exists: everything is material or physical. It originates with the early Greek thinkers, such as Democritus, and materialism is physicalism. Understood as a general theory about what exists it is an ontological view. I have two opening sections on Elizabeth Grosz’s attempt at a “new materialism” and “renaturalization.” In the rest of the chapter I then look at Deleuze’s Spinozism of the 1960s and the highly innovative thinking that he developed with Guattari in 1980 with the publication of A Thousand Plateaus. I conclude with some critical points of reflection.

A New Materialism? What is taken to constitute the “new materialism” is typically said to ques- tion the privilege given to the human being in the human/nonhuman binary, along with the emphasis on mind and subjectivity and the construal of matter as passive and inert, so at the core of this latest turn in theory is a preoccupation with the agential properties of matter itself. Even within inorganic matter there are emergent, generative powers or agentic capacities to be discerned, and this is seen to entail the breakdown of the distinction between organic and inorganic, or animate and inanimate, at the ontologi- cal level. Furthermore, materiality is taken to be something more than mere matter. As Coole and Frost (2010) put it, there is “an excess, force, vital- ity, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, pro- ductive, unpredictable.” This means for them that amidst “a multitude of 90 Ansell-Pearson interlocking systems and forces” we can “consider anew the location and nature of capacities for agency” (9). As Coole and Frost further put it, the perception now among many working in the humanities and the social sci- ences is that “the radicalism of the dominant discourses which have flour- ished under the cultural turn is now more or less exhausted” (6). This is encapsulated in the “feeling” that “the dominant constructivist orientation to social analysis is inadequate to thinking about matter, materiality, and politics in ways that do justice to the contemporary context of biopolitics and global political economy” (6). There is thus needed, they further con- tend, “a theoretical rapprochement with material realism” (6). The key insight and claim centres on the question of agency:

Conceiving matter as possessing its own modes of self-transformation, self-organization, and directedness, and thus no longer as simply pas- sive or inert, disturbs the conventional sense that agents are exclusively human who possess the cognitive abilities, intentionality, and freedom to make autonomous decisions and the corollary presumption that humans have the right or ability to master nature. Instead, the human species is being relocated within a natural environment whose material forces themselves manifest certain agentic capacities … Matter is no longer imagined here as a massive, opaque plenitude but is recognized instead as indeterminate, constantly forming and reforming in unex- pected ways. (10)

The aim here is to be strictly non-anthropocentric: there is no privileging of human bodies or even of human capacities for agency. The contention is as follows: “As a consequence, the human species, and the qualities of self-reflection, self-awareness, and rationality traditionally used to distin- guish it from the rest of nature, may now seem little more than contingent and provisional forms or processes within a broader evolutionary or cosmic productivity” (20). In its Deleuzian mode the new materialism has an intellectual and a polit- ical agenda. It seeks to contest the primacy accorded to the human in our theoretical discourses and then utilize this for the ends of a post-humanist position. In the process it raises questions about the status and development of Deleuze’s thought, and forces one to ask: what is the relation between Deleuze’s own work and his collaborative work with Guattari? For it is the latter work that the new materialists most draw upon in order to advance this materialism. Elizabeth Grosz (2015) is more confident than I am when she asserts that, and I quote:

These nonhuman forces—from the smallest sub-atomic forces to the operation of solar systems, forces comprising the human and its over- coming, forces that cannot be comprehended by the human … but Deleuze and New Materialism 91 that connect the human to all that is both human and nonhuman—are Deleuze’s primary preoccupation throughout his work. (19)

Such a claim clearly reveals that the Deleuzian-inspired new materialism aligns itself with the position of post-humanism. For Grosz to think the human in relation to the non-human entails upheavals and challenges vari- ous forms of human, and even post-human, disciplinarity (22–23). She con- tends in a recent interview that for Deleuze Spinoza is the prince of the philosophers on account of his far-reaching naturalization of the human: the human occupies a miniscule place on the impersonal “plane of immanence” (this notion is handled later in the chapter). Thus, “When we understand the human, not as the telos or end of nature but as a small part of it, many phil- osophical claims about human privilege fall away” (22). The only problem with this position is that it can make little sense of key work Deleuze carried out in the 1950s and 1960s which centers on questions of human subjectiv- ity, agency, and ethical pedagogy. It also fails to acknowledge the complex- ity and complex evolution of his reading of Spinoza, the chief source for a reading of Deleuze as a naturalist and materialist. The work of Grosz has been identified with new materialism, though she in fact embraces it only with qualification and some hesitation. She sees her work in two ways. First, it attempts to go beyond the post-war dis- courses of structuralism and post-structuralism. For her, these discourses have served to foreclose the problem of existence of an independent mate- rial reality, one beyond human consciousness and control, and in favor of emphasizing the constructed character of the real. Second, she wants, “following Darwin,” a concept of matter that does not remove it from its opposing term, be it mind, life, idea, form, or spirit. She confesses that she is not sure that this project can be still be said to be one of materialism, and then she adds:

Perhaps it involves a new kind of materialism; or perhaps materialism is no longer an adequate term and we need to generate a new term. What I am seeking is a new concept of matter that also involves something incorporeal, a spark of virtuality that enables life to emerge. (Grosz 2011b, 18)

Deleuze is central to this project with his emphasis on pre-individual virtual- ity and reliance on a genealogy of the concept of matter that is said by Grosz to run from Darwin, through Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson on to Gilbert Simondon and Raymond Ruyer (21). In essence, she wants a new materialism that conceives of matter in terms of events and processes rather than in terms of things and objects. Already we begin to see the “old” char- acter of much of what is taken to be a new materialism: the concern with an ontology of the real is arguably as old, in its early modern incarnation, as 92 Ansell-Pearson Spinoza, and the desire for a philosophy of events and processes strikes up a rapport and an affinity with the modern likes of Bergson and Whitehead. In the work of both Grosz and Rosi Braidotti then, two of the main pro- ponents of a new materialism that is inspired by the work of Deleuze, there is expressed a desire for a return to the real and to realism: “I would like to return to the question of the real, the question of ontology, the question that the privileging of subjectivity and representation has tended to foreclose” (Grosz 2011b, 17). And Braidotti (2012) echoes this when she argues that we need to locate “Life itself” as a nonhuman agent at the center of scientific and political debate: “After so much emphasis on the linguistic and the cultural, an ontology of presence replaces textual or other deconstruction” (171). She then invokes “neorealist practices of bodily materialism” and refers to “radi- cal neo-materialism or posthuman feminism.” Furthermore, Grosz (2011a) reads Deleuze as producing not a materialism but a “philosophy of the real” and that is to be conceived as a “theory that addresses the real without dis- tinguishing its material from its ideal components, a kind of supersaturated materialism, a materialism that incorporates that which is commonly opposed to it—the ideal, the conceptual, the mind, or consciousness” (43). These are welcome moves in the light of the emphatic priority accorded in recent decades to subjectivity and representation and in which it is assumed that it is not possible to think beyond the human. However, it’s far from clear to me that the primary move suggested by the new materialism, away from the representational subject to the ontologically real, captures what is most distinctive about Deleuze’s philosophical practice, chiefly, its ethi- cal motivation. Deleuze is an ethically motivated naturalist who attaches himself to naturalism because he sees it as a project of demystification and human emancipation. The task is to liberate human beings from the realm of myth: the myths of religion, of a false physics, and of a false philoso- phy. Although it can be conceded that the new materialism would welcome such a conception—philosophy as demystification—we cannot overlook the extent to which this requires an ethical pedagogy of the human being and of the kind undertaken by Spinoza in his “ethics” (an education in the three main kinds of knowledge, for example). In addition, we can note that Grosz’s conception of a new materialism, in which matter is to be supplemented by a notion of virtuality, is fully anticipated by Deleuze and at work in his appreciation of key early modern materialists or natural- ists such as Spinoza. Deleuze’s new materialism has its location in sources that we would expect it to have on an informed appreciation of the history of philosophy, namely, in Epicureanism and Spinozism. However, Deleuze does not himself conceive the new materialism as operating in terms of a supplementary dimension of ideality or virtuality. On the contrary, he sees virtual or ideal actions and passions as fully immanent features of mat- ter itself. Perhaps this is what Grosz actually means, and if she does then her characterization of the new materialism is incisive and in tune with Deleuze’s own conception of it. Deleuze and New Materialism 93 What cannot be upheld, though, is the idea that Deleuze flattens ­ontology in such a way that he is seen to have little concern, if any, with issues of normativity and as they pertain to what is distinctive about the existence of the human animal. This is my main anxiety over the Deleuzian-inspired new materialism: it fails to engage with key aspects of Deleuze’s work in the 1950s and 1960s that center on issues of normativity, including as they per- tain to the distinctive ethical character of the human animal. How can we claim that the human animal is ethically distinguished? A clue to Deleuze’s own position on this issue is provided in his early short essay on “Instincts and Institutions,” in which he holds to the view that in the case of both instinct and institution we are dealing with “procedures of satisfaction” but with a key difference in the case of the human subject: an organism responds instinctively to external stimuli, “extracting from the external world the elements which will satisfy its tendencies and needs” (Deleuze 2004, 19). More, “these elements comprise worlds that are specific to different ani- mals” (19). In the case of the human animal, however, “the subject institutes an original world between its tendencies and the external milieu, developing an artificial means of satisfaction” (19). In this piece, Deleuze even goes so far as to maintain that, “humans have no instincts, they build institutions. The Human is an animal decimating its species” (21). In short, the human is an inventive species, building institutions and creating norms as a way of satisfying its needs and desires. As a “species,” then, we are ethically and politically distinguished since the means of satisfying our life is not given or simply of the order of instinct. Deleuze always maintained that the ethical and the social are profoundly positive. As he puts it in the early essay, “if it is true that tendencies are satisfied by the institution, the institution is not explained by tendencies. The same sexual needs will never explain the mul- tiple possible forms of marriage” (20). In his first published book on Hume of 1953, Deleuze ([1953], 1991) opposes social contract theories because they present us with a false and abstract image of society, in which society is defined only in a negative way—society is construed as a set of limita- tions on egoisms and interests rather than as a positive system of invented endeavors: “the state of nature is always already more than a simple state of nature” (39). As Deleuze seeks to show, the problem of society is not one of limitation but of integration. In short, the human animal is, first and foremost, an inventive species, so that although justice is an artifice and not nature, for us artifice is part of our nature. Justice is that which extends and expands our passions. Deleuze writes: ‘The social is profoundly creative, inventive, and positive” (46). And: “the subject is normative” (86).

The Politics of Renaturalization I now want to focus on Grosz’s project of renaturalization in which she makes inventive use of Deleuze’s readings of Nietzsche and Spinoza. In seek- ing to show our fundamental continuity with nonhuman agencies the result, 94 Ansell-Pearson I want to suggest, is a neglect of core Deleuzian insights into the normative character of the human creature. This is what I focus on in my second sec- tion on Deleuze. Bergson defined the task of philosophy as one of “thinking beyond the human condition,” where this condition refers not to an existential pre- dicament but an evolutionary one, naming the dominance of our spatialized habits and established patterns of representation (see Bergson 1965, 193). Grosz has her own unique way of thinking beyond the human. She is per- haps distinctive among the feminist cultural theorists of her generation in writing so positively of nature, as well as life and biology, and developing what one commentator has insightfully called a “politics of renaturaliza- tion.” According to Hasana Sharp (2011), on Grosz’s interpretation nature “designates uncontainable dynamism, irrepressible mutation, and constant self-differentiation. She elaborates and calls for new models of nature that insist on our continuity with nonhuman agencies” (169). Of course, Grosz is attentive to the pitfalls identified by decades of denaturalizing critique, and it is well known that feminists, race theorists, and critical theorists have advanced strong suspicions of appeals to nature, which often function as discourses of normalization. However, Grosz’s appeals to nature are clearly designed to disrupt such normalization. Like other theorists, among which I would include myself, she appeals to the work of Deleuze and Guattari in order to do this, making productive if contentious use of their notion of a becoming-imperceptible (Ansell-Pearson 1999).4 So, whilst there is an acknowledgment of the need to denaturalize those discourses that eternalize social roles, attributing in the process a transhistorical human nature, “we also need to see our projects in terms of natural forces that exceed human powers” (Sharp 2011, 174). As a feminist Grosz is stridently anti-humanist: “Because, for Grosz, any humanization and anthropomorphism falls into a phallocentric economy of the same, she rejects the possibility of stretch- ing the category of the human to include its excluded others” (168). As Sharp puts it, Grosz confronts her readers with a theoretical choice between a humanist philosophy of the subject and an inhuman theory of imper- sonal, natural forces (Grosz 2002, 470). Her source for this philosophy of the impersonal is Nietzsche, though Sharp thinks it can also be located in Spinoza. Perhaps Grosz is at her most contentious with the idea of a politics of imperceptibility, which she develops and advances contra the perceived humanist claims of a politics of recognition. She writes of a “regime of rec- ognition,” which she equates with an identity politics (Grosz 2002, 463). Here, identity is conceived not as something inherent, as given or internally developed, “but as bestowed by an other, and only an other, and thus can also be taken away by an other” (465). Grosz adds to this: “Identity comes only as result of the dual motion of the internalization, or introjection of otherness, and the projection onto the other of some fundamental similarity or identification with the subject” (465). Deleuze and New Materialism 95 What are Grosz’s main claims and arguments about the restricting confines of an identity politics? She associates the politics of recognition with the Hegelian “law of desire” in which the subject can only become a subject as such through being recognized by another subject (Grosz 2002, 465). Her main anxiety is that a vision of justice predicated upon the vali- dation of social subjects by other subjects is to succumb to a servile poli- tics. Instead we should think about politics in terms of agonistic forces and impersonal becomings. As noted, Grosz has recourse to Nietzsche to develop such a politics. She refers, for example, to Deleuze’s Nietzsche et la philosophie (1962) as a significant event in the articulation of such a politics since it provided a “Nietzschean rewriting of the Hegelian dialectic as the servile rationalization of the slave and the herd, rather than as the movement of an enlightening ‘spirit’ to its own self-fruition” (Grosz 2002, 466). This means that instead of emphasizing the need for an identity the task is to seek out forces and continuous self-modification, including what Grosz problematically calls “an untimely leap into futurity” (466). I say problematic since Nietzsche himself argues against all and any such “leaps” into the futures (see the denouement to the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, for example). The key move is the following one: instead of offering a model of liberation through identity based on the sub- ject’s internal constitution, which is to provide a model of psychical interi- ority “inhabited by the spectre of the other,” we think in terms of subjects as bodies and forces with the capacity to act and be acted upon (466). Here she follows Deleuze in presenting a Spinozist-inspired Nietzscheanism, combining a notion of force with one of affectivity [affective bodies] (See Deleuze 1983, chapter 2). Grosz wants to go a long way with this elusive notion of force. She wants us to stop conceptualizing the subject as an agent of causal effects, or as a victim of another’s agency, and instead see things in a “Nietzschean” man- ner in which politics, subjectivity, and the social are to be viewed “as the consequences of the play of the multiplicity of active and reactive forces that have no agency, or are all that agency and identity consist in” (Grosz 2002, 467). This requires an understanding of force in terms of “its full sub- human and super-human resonances: as the inhuman which both makes the human possible and which at the same time positions the human within a world where forces work in spite of and around the human, within and as the human” (467). For Grosz, the struggle to produce a different future is not a struggle by subjects in which the desire is to be recognized and valued, “but a struggle to mobilize and transform the position of women, the alignment of forces that constitute that ‘identity’ and ‘position,’ that stratification that stabilizes itself as a place and an identity. Politics can be seen as the struggle of imperceptible forces, forces in us and around, forces in continual conflict” (467). In this task we expose the fiction of ourselves as masterful subjects, that is, as masters of the very forces that constitute us as subjects. 96 Ansell-Pearson The question can now be posed: need we accept the terms of the “­theoretical choice” Grosz presents us with between a humanist philosophy of the subject and an anti-humanist philosophy of forces? Does Deleuze not offer an ethical pedagogy of the subject in his work on Spinoza that has affinities with a humanist orientation? To this topic I now turn.

Deleuze and Naturalism Let me now turn to Deleuze. In this section I wish simply to note some salient features of his thinking as it pertains to naturalism and materialism. In his work Deleuze (1992) offers a new naturalism and that at one point he calls a “new materialism” (321). It is ironic perhaps that with the rise of the new materialisms in recent years, in which Deleuze’s writings and concepts have come to play such a seminal role, this fact is rarely, if ever, acknowledged or drawn upon. Deleuze’s commitment to, and concep- tions of, naturalism/materialism are to be found in two main sources: his essay on Lucretius from the 1960s and his book on Spinoza, also from the 1960s. Although well known today as an appendix to The Logic of Sense from 1969, Deleuze’s essay “Lucretius and the Simulacrum” was first pub- lished in 1961 in Les études Philosophiques as “Lucrèce et le naturalisme.” Deleuze (1992) speaks of Spinoza’s “realization of a naturalist program” that has both mechanist and dynamic aspects (229). In fact, he locates a “new naturalism” in both Leibniz and Spinoza and articulates a clear prefer- ence for the latter. For Deleuze, Spinoza belongs to a tradition of practical philosophy that involves naturalism. This naturalism consists in the critique of superstition since it is this that cuts us off from our power of action and diminishes it, and induces in us sadness: naturalism exists, says Deleuze, to defeat this sadness (270). Spinoza is a materialist in the importance he places on the body and on bodies. One might also wish to appeal to Spinoza’s atheism, though here Deleuze has a specific understanding of his atheism: it consists in the insight that the moral pseudo-law is simply the measure of our misunderstanding of natural laws (253). For Deleuze, the question of Spinoza’s atheism is without interest if it depends on arbitrary definitions of theism and atheism, and we can only pose the question in relation to what is commonly referred to as “God” from the religious viewpoint. The new materialism is, for Deleuze, first and foremost, a philosophy of immanence (322). In this materialism, centred on immanence (or more traditionally, pantheism), there is the attempt to recognize the positivity of nature and penetrate its depths and to grant the human being the thinking capacities necessary to penetrate these depths. Nature is not construed as passive or inert, and instead Deleuze speaks of an “expressive” nature, a nature of causal explication, and argues that there is an immanence of expression in what expresses itself (including substance, attributes, and modes).5 He acknowledges that in this thinking of immanence the concept “insinuates itself among the transcendent concepts of emanative or creationist theology” Deleuze and New Materialism 97 (232). The transformation effected, however, is radical since there is no transcendence of the One beyond or above Being or the transcendence of a Being above its creation. Being is univocal in all its expressions, so that the One is said with a single meaning of all that differs. Following Ferdinand Alquié (1906–85), Deleuze construes the new natu- ralism as a reaction to Cartesianism. Descartes’ venture of a mathematical and mechanical science devalues nature by depriving “it of any virtuality or potentiality, any immanent power, any inherent being” (Deleuze 2002, 227). In Cartesian metaphysics Being is sought outside nature and in a sub- ject that thinks it and a God that creates it. The importance of the anti- Cartesian reaction is that it seeks to re-establish the claims of a nature that is granted specific forces and powers. Deleuze carefully elaborates:

But a matter, also, of retaining the chief discovery of Cartesian mecha- nism: every power is actual, in act; the powers of Nature are no longer virtualities referred to occult entities, to souls or minds through which they are realized. Leibniz formulates the program perfectly: to counter Descartes by restoring to Nature the force of action and passion, but this without falling back into a pagan vision of the world, an idolatry of Nature. Spinoza’s program is very similar. (228)

Deleuze is clear that in both Leibniz and Spinoza the attempt is made to restore a philosophy of nature. In both the idea of “expression” is cen- tral; indeed, Deleuze goes so far as to claim that their anti-Cartesianism is grounded in this idea. In Spinoza nature comprises and contains everything and is at the same time explicated and implicated in each thing: “Attributes involve and explicate substance, which in turn comprises all attributes. Modes involve and explicate the attributes on which they depend, while the attribute in turn contains the essence of all its modes” (17). In this expressive ontology “substance is self-expressing in the attributes: it is both what is denoted by them and what manifests itself in them. The essence of substance, on the other hand, is the sense of substance’s self- expression” (Wasser 2007, 53). However, Deleuze (1992) is keen to defend Spinoza’s system from the kind of concern about it articulated by Leibniz, namely, that it renders us impotent as creatures: “the theory of modes was only a means of taking from creatures all their activity, dynamism, indi- viduality, all their authentic reality. Modes were only phantasms, phantoms, fantastic projections of a single Substance” (226). For Deleuze, everything in Spinoza contradicts such an interpretation. Rather than utilizing the idea of the mode so as to take power away from creatures, it is, Deleuze contends, the only way of showing how things participate in God’s power, “how they are parts of divine power, but singular parts, intensive quantities, irreducible degrees” (227). If man is a part of the power or essence of God (or Nature) this is the case only insofar as the essence of God explicates itself through 98 Ansell-Pearson the essence of the human being. For Deleuze, Leibniz and Spinoza are in fact united in sharing the project of a new naturalism. The difference is that Spinoza’s philosophy of nature is the more dynamical and non-finalist of the two. The new naturalism Deleuze espouses has its anchor, then, in readings of Leibniz and Spinoza. It’s from an anchor in this naturalism that Deleuze develops an ethics, a conception of normative activity, and an ethology that brings the human and the animal into rapport whilst respecting the differ- ences between the human and other forms of life: our task as human ani- mals is a uniquely normative one and we shall see in due course just what this entails and why Deleuze is committed to such a view. In spite of his commitment, then, to univocity and immanence, Deleuze does not produce an ontology in which there are no longer distinctions to be made between forms of life and modes of being or power, so in his work there is a clear recognition that the human animal is the normative animal par excellence. Deleuze, therefore, cannot be allied with new materialisms that collapse normative distinctions and that seek to deprive the human of its normative privilege, however we construe this.

Deleuze on Spinoza and a New Naturalism There are two key aspects to Deleuze’s thinking I now wish to explore: first, the nature of his naturalism, and second, how he evinces in accordance with this naturalism a thinking of norms and ethics. The aim is to show that Deleuze has a set of distinctive insights into the normative character of the human animal. Although, as we shall see, his work with Guattari opens up new ontological possibilities for thought and life, bringing human and nonhuman life into rapport on a plane of immanence, even here there is an acknowledgment that the human animal is ethically distinguished. Deleuze sometimes writes of Spinoza’s “new materialism” and mostly of his “new naturalism.” As I have indicated, the former centers on the thinking of immanence and a focus on the body, and the latter focuses on an expressive nature. In Spinoza nature is characterized as a positive and productive power. It is from within infinite nature that all finite things exist as a plurality of modes: nature is not the creation of a transcendent God and the thinking subject is not placed outside the order of nature. Two points are worth stressing. First, that Deleuze fully acknowledges that the dynamic characteristics of our being—our conatus in Spinoza’s language—are fully linked with mechanical ones. For example, a body’s conatus requires the effort to preserve the state to which it has been determined by nature. At the same time: “A composite body’s conatus is also the effort to maintain the body’s ability to be affected in a great number of ways” (Deleuze 1992, 230). We are thus determined in our capacity to be affected and so long as we remain exercised by passive affections then our conatus is determined by passions, in which our desires are born from passions. However, even Deleuze and New Materialism 99 on the level of a passive affection, which testifies to our impotence and cuts us off from that of which we are capable, we find, however minimal, some degree of a power of action (231). This leads us to acknowledging a second point: the ethical task is an on-going labor. As substance, God is necessar- ily the cause of all his affections, and as these affections can be explained by his nature they can be called “actions.” The case is completely different with finite modes, such as ourselves. Such modes do not exist by virtue of their own nature; rather, their existence is composed of extensive parts that are determined and affected from outside. This is why we can say that the affections of modes are passions: the changes that the modes undergo are not explained by their natures alone. Childhood is the obvious example in the human case, an abject state common to all of us and in which we depend heavily on external causes. Now the ethical question and task comes to the fore, which can be put as follows: can a finite mode attain a state of active affections and, if so, how? Here, we need a rather modest conception of what is possible: whilst we exist as finite modes we find it impossible to eliminate completely the level of passions, so the best we can bring about is that such passions occupy only a small part of ourselves (219). A profound difference between Spinoza and Leibniz can be noted: “Spinoza’s dynamism … deliberately excludes all finality” (Deleuze 1992, 233). For Spinoza, teleology is not at work in nature: “Nature is a complex process without any predetermined end … There is no ultimate foundation outside of nature, but immanent powers, relations, and bodily compositions constitutive of nature itself” (Hayden 1998, 110). Deleuze holds Leibniz’s finalism to be an inverted mechanism in which, although there is an expres- sive nature, this nature is given by God and the pre-established harmony. Things are very different in Spinoza. In him we find a pure immanent causal- ity that is to be thought in terms of the endowment of things with their own force of power and that belongs to them as modes. On this conception of nature, finality is excluded, and this is the true significance of the notion of conatus: “Spinoza’s theory of conatus has no other function than to present dynamism for what it is by stripping it of any finalist significance” (Deleuze 1992, 233). This means that there is no given moral harmony, no metaphys- ics of essences, and no mechanics of phenomena: “Expression in Nature is never a final symbolization, but always, and everywhere, a causal explica- tion” (232). It is not that there is no mechanism or determinism in Spinoza for Deleuze; rather, he is pointing out that, although everything is physical, there is also a level on which a physics of force and dynamism allows for essence to assert itself in existence and espouse the variations of the power of action. The “physical” is to be understood in three ways: (a) in terms of a physics of intensive quantity corresponding to modal essences; (b) in terms of a physics of extensive quantity, which is a mechanism by which modes come into existence; (c) in terms of a physics of force representing or signi- fying a “dynamism” through which essences assert themselves in existence and espouse the variations of their power of acting. 100 Ansell-Pearson For Deleuze, Spinoza is most definitely engaged in a philosophy of nature. But for Deleuze it is also the case that Spinoza belongs to a great tradition of practical philosophy, the chief task of which is that of demystification (per- taining to myths and superstitions). The two projects are inseparably linked since it is through an understanding of what nature is—asking questions about how it works and coming to know that we are fully implicated in it— that we can acquire and cultivate a “superior human nature,” moving from a human condition of passivity and reactivity to a superior one of activity. Among other things, superstition is what cuts us off from our power of action and diminishes it, including fear and the hope linked to fear, as well as the anxiety that leads us to phantoms. I quote from Deleuze (1992):

Like Lucretrius, Spinoza knows that there are no joyful myths or super- stitions. Like Lucretius he sets the image of a positive Nature against the uncertainty of the gods: what is opposed to Nature is not Culture, nor the state of Reason, or even the civil State, but only the super- stition that threatens all human endeavour. And, like Lucretius again, Spinoza assigns to philosophy the task of denouncing all that is sad, that lives on sadness, and all those who depend on sadness as the basis of their power … The devaluation of sad passions, and the denunciation of those who cultivate, and depend on, them form the practical object of philosophy. (270)

Of course, it’s a little more complicated than this since, as Deleuze acknowl- edges, some sad passions have a social function and can be socially use- ful (hope, humility, remorse, etc.). Still, for Deleuze, naturalism—from Lucretius to Spinoza and Nietzsche—is directed toward, and moved by, a philosophy of affirmation: “Spinoza’s naturalism is defined by speculative affirmation in his theory of substance, and by practical joy in his conception of modes” (272). Deleuze cites Spinoza’s well-known piece of wisdom that the free human being thinks of nothing less than death and that true wisdom is a meditation on life and not death. How does Deleuze develop a normative ethics from this new naturalism? He writes of Spinoza developing a theory of natural right from the insights of Hobbes that is opposed to the classical theory of natural law. The antique tradition of natural law (Cicero) advances the following theses: (a) our being can be defined by its perfection within an order of ends (we are naturally reasonable and sociable); (b) the state of nature does not precede society but rather we live in conformity with nature in a good civil society; (c) in this state what is primary and unconditional are duties: our natural powers are only potential and require an act of reason to realize them in relation to the ends they need to serve. Spinoza transforms this in a specific manner, the details of which we do not need to trace here, grounding everything in natural right or power. The Deleuze and New Materialism 101 key development that needs to take place in our thinking for Deleuze (1992) is this: it needs to be a matter of capacities and powers, in which “law” is construed as identical to “right” and this means that natural laws are to be conceived as norms of power rather than rules of duty: “This is the very meaning of the word law: the law of nature is never a rule of duty, but the norm of a power, the unity of right, power and its exercise” (258). On this model duties, of whatever kind, are always secondary relative to the exercise of our power and the preservation of our right. Moreover:

Thus the moral law that purports to prohibit and command, involves a kind of mystification: the less we understand the laws of nature, that is, the norms of life, the more we interpret them as orders and prohibi- tions—to the point that the philosopher must hesitate before using the word ‘law’, so does it retain a moral aftertaste. (268)

These norms are ones of life in the sense that they relate to the strength and the power of the actions of individuals. We are normative types or animals out of a specific motivation: we do not wish to be only the subject of chance encounters but rather to seek a rational organisation of our natural powers and to enhance the cultivation and enjoyment of these powers. Moreover, as one commentator on Spinoza argues, although he is a deep naturalist and accepts rocks have minds, he has no difficulty “accepting that these minds are not capable of the things required of agents, such as deliberation or responding to reasons” (Kisner 2011, 59). So, although the human is a mode like other modes it is also the most complex mode, since it is in pos- session of the greatest number of affects and ideas. The difference between natural law and civil law is minimal on Spinoza’s naturalistic and monistic account. Human laws, i.e., civil laws, pertain to human interests in a specific manner, whilst the laws of nature do not. Still, human laws are “expressions” of natural law in the sense that in their inven- tion human beings are following their natural impulse (the natural law) to preserve themselves. As one commentator has expressed it:

Nature herself does not deliver civil law in its detail, but she certainly provides the impetus for it, and the human being who conceives statutes is just as much a natural being heeding the call of self-preservation as is the caveman who hunts for food. (DeBrabander 2007, 90)

In nature we do not see a moral difference—of good and evil—but we can posit in relation to it a legitimate “ethical” difference, such as the differ- ence between the wise man and the foolish person. The content of Reason is strength or freedom. Deleuze notes that this difference does not relate to conatus since fools and ignorant human beings seek to persevere in their 102 Ansell-Pearson being as much as reasonable and strong human beings. How, then, do we think this ethical difference and locate it? For Deleuze (1992) this centers on the kind of affections that guide our conatus, and this involves developing adequate ideas and active affections: “Reason, strength, and freedom … are inseparable from a formative process, a development, a culture. Nobody is born free, nobody is born reasonable. And nobody can undergo for us the slow learning of what agrees with our nature, the slow effort of discover- ing our joys” (262). For Deleuze, reason is involved in all the stages of our becoming ethical and normative subjects, enabling us to move from the badness of chance encounters to common notions and adequate ideas, and so helping us make the effort to organize our encounters, including agree- ments and disagreements, in a more thoughtful and rational manner (280). For Deleuze, then, reason—even in its so-called “commandments”—does not demand anything from us that is contrary to nature and so a reason- able being can be said to “reproduce and express the effort of Nature as a whole” (265). Deleuze refuses to see reason simply as an artificial endeavor (say one of “convention”); rather, it is necessary to appreciate that reason proceeds not by artifice but by a natural combination of relations, and here the emphasis is not on a prudential calculation of self-interest and interests so as to bring about social union, but rather “a kind of direct recognition (reconnaissance) of man by man” (264). What exactly does Deleuze mean by appealing to this “recognition”? It works quite differently to the notion of recognition Grosz is keen to criti- cize. In an effort to diminish the role of sad passions in our lives we strive to rationally organise our encounters. True utility is to be defined as seeking to organize what is useful to us in terms of striving to encounter bodies that agree in nature with us. It is impossible for us to avoid all “bad” encoun- ters, such as disease and death. Nevertheless, it is possible for us to strive to unite with what agrees with our nature and that gives the expectation of a maximum of joyful affections. Deleuze (1992) now argues: “if it be asked what is most useful to us, this will be seen to be man. For man in principle agrees in nature with man; man is absolutely or truly useful to man” (261). This means that the effort to organize rational encounters translates itself into an effort to form an association of human beings in relations that can be combined. To practice reason in this context is to do nothing contrary to Nature since the demand made is only that everyone should love them- selves and seek what is useful to themselves, striving to preserve their being by increasing their power of action. Deleuze insists, then, that: “There is thus no artificiality or conventionality in reason’s endeavour … The state of reason is one with the formation of a higher kind of body and a higher kind of soul” (264). Man recognizes man and we, as finite modes, recog- nize, through common notions, a positive order of Nature: “constitutive or characteristic relations by which bodies agree with, and are opposed to, one another. Laws of Nature no longer appear as commands and prohibitions, but for what they are … norms of composition, rules for the realization of Deleuze and New Materialism 103 powers” (291). Recognition in this context means, then, a kind of gratitude. As Spinoza (1996) himself writes: “Only free human beings are very thank- ful to one another” (IV: p. 71). What is a norm? Deleuze calls it, following Hume, “a general rule.” Whatever these norms are—rights of possession, rules of interaction—they exist to provide human activity and endeavor with stability and community: “The function of the rule is to determine a stable and common point of view, firm and calm, independent of our present situation” (Deleuze 1991, 41). For Deleuze, the human animal is an inventive species owing to its cul- tural formation and for Deleuze this is our role within nature. Although we can “naturalize” humanity we need to see ethics and politics as our nature. Deleuze refuses to see the realm of human invention, such as custom, artifice, and convention, as ontologically opposed to nature, though clearly there is plenty of room for a critique of culture and its inventions.

Late Deleuze I now want to turn finally to Deleuze’s collaborative work with Guattari and Deleuze’s later Spinozism. I am suggesting that in spite of the emphasis on ontological univocity, Deleuze continues to recognize that the human animal is ethically and normatively distinguished. Deleuze and Guattari favor a model of evolution in which emphasis is placed on transversal communication that takes place across phylogenetic lineages and in contrast to genealogical tree models, and where evolution is mapped in terms of relations of filiation and descent. A rhizome, for exam- ple, is said to be “anti-genealogy” that operates not through filiation or descent, but rather via “variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots.” They see this as an inventive domain of evolution since it involves novel alli- ances or creative becomings. They write: “if evolution includes any veritable becomings, it is in the domain of symbioses that bring into play beings of totally different scales and kingdoms, with no possible filiation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 238). In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari (1988) posit nature as a plane of consistency that is “like an immense abstract machine,” which they call the “machinic phylum.” It is said to be “abstract” yet “real and indi- vidual”: “its pieces are various assemblages and individuals, each of which groups together an infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more or less interconnected relations” (254). This is, in fact, to posit a novel mon- ism in which the plane of nature enjoys a unity that “applies equally to the inanimate and animate, the artificial and the natural” (254). It is now worth citing Deleuze and Guattari at length on the character of this plane since it is their fundamental insight:

Its unity has nothing to do with a ground buried deep within things, nor with an end or a project in the mind of God. Instead, it is a plane upon 104 Ansell-Pearson which everything is laid out, and which is like the intersection of all forms, the machine of all functions; its dimensions increase, however, with those of the multiplicities of individualities it cuts across. It is a fixed plane, upon which things are distinguished from one another only by speed and slowness. A plane of univocality opposed to analogy. The One is said with a single meaning of all the multiple. Being expresses in a single meaning all that differs. What we are talking about is not the unity of substance but the infinity of the modifications that are part of one another on this unique plane of life. (254)

There is much here to unpack and which merits clarification. I cannot do this here. I want instead to focus on this point: Deleuze is interested in how we define a body and its powers of being and acting. For him, a body can be almost anything and can be defined in two ways: first, it is composed of an infinite number of particles in which it is characterized by relations of motion and rest, speeds and slownesses; second, a body is an “affective” one in that it affects other bodies and is in turn affected by them. Deleuze thinks the Spinozist characterization of a body is far-reaching since it means that what truly defines a body is neither form nor functions, but the rela- tions of movement and affect. It is the second proposition just outlined that interests Deleuze the most and leads him to discuss biology and ethology, especially the work of von Uexküll. He writes: “You will define an animal, or a human being, not by its form, its organs, and its functions, and not as a subject either; you will define it by the affects of which it is capable” (Deleuze 1988, 124). So, he suggests, long after Spinoza we find biologists and naturalists, such as von Uexküll, describing animal worlds in terms of affects and their capacities. Now, Deleuze acknowledges that there is a difference between the human world and animal worlds but holds that this novel ethology can be made use of in the case of the human. We do not know what affects we are capable of in advance, and this suggests that there is an “empirical education” in life, involving “a long affair of experimentation, a lasting prudence” and a wisdom that implies constructing a plane of immanence. In terms of our becoming-ethical we can say that we do not know what a body can do: it is a mode of practical living and experimenting, as well as, of course, further- ing the active life, the life of affirmative activity, for example, cultivating the active affects of generosity and joyfulness, as opposed to the passive and sad affects of hatred, fear, and cruelty. Deleuze even thinks ethology has a political implication and application since it becomes “no longer a matter of utilizations or captures, but of sociabilities and communities” (1988, 126). In terms of human community we might say the task is to form a higher individual, and all the classical questions of modern political thinking then enter onto the horizon, such as: “How can a being take another being into its world, but while preserving or respecting the other’s own relations and Deleuze and New Materialism 105 world?” (126). We can also explore the different types of sociabilities that may be available to us as human animals, such as the difference between the community of human beings and that of rational beings. The picture of life Deleuze develops in his later writings with Guattari, and in “Spinoza and Us,” can readily lead us astray, thinking mistakenly that he has completely collapsed distinctions between nonhuman and human, nature and culture, nature and artifice. Of course, this is the great naturalist vision: to dethrone the primacy of the human and naturalize it. As Grosz (2011a) puts it, the aim is to wrest life from “the privilege of the human” and place it in the living and nonliving worlds (39). For Deleuze, too, things are in relation with one another through this breakdown of form and function and thinking beyond genealogical or filial models of evolution. However, this does not mean that the ethical becoming of the human is not something specific or singled out for special treatment.

Conclusion My main critical point in conclusion can be articulated as follows: the com- mitment to univocity does not mean that all living systems and entities enjoy the same ethical and cultural reality. In his work in the 1950s and 1960s, on Hume and Spinoza, for example, Deleuze clearly recognizes that the human animal is the normative animal par excellence, being what Hume called “the inventive species.” Today, of course, we would be keen to describe it as also the destructive species. It is clear though that Deleuze does not provide enough information in his later writings about the different communities and sociabilities that might exist, nor reflect on our treatment of nature or ecological issues. However, I think Deleuze provides us with new concepts that can contribute to critical work on these topics, and this has been done in the literature. For example, let’s reflect on the possible ecological significance of nature conceived as an immanent plane of life in which living things are not fixed by an invariable order. If nature is distributive of a life of affects and affective relations, then there is a basis for affirming the continuity between each thing in the world, and basis for appreciating the multiplicity and diversity of nature, so endorsing the concept of biodiversity and giving us a model of ecological complexity (Hayden 1998, 118). Here we might appeal to the multiplicity of ecological milieu, the diversity of their interactive elements and the dynamic relations between milieux, in which each thing constantly connects to an immanent exteriority in order to flourish. We cannot posit this plane as an indifferent and closed system. Of course, we might also suppose this means the end of the human/nonhuman distinction and on an ontological level this makes sense, though I think it important we do not collapse it on other levels: culture, history, ethics, or politics. We have seen the extent to which Deleuze provides a new naturalism through his re-working of Spinozism (his Epicureanism is equally important 106 Ansell-Pearson but has not been dealt with here),6 and we have also seen the extent to which this commitment to naturalism on his part is ethically motivated. My main contention has been that although Deleuze produces an innovative ontol- ogy, or onto-ethology, he cannot be identified with the intellectual move that would deprive the human animal of its ethico-normative distinctiveness. True, Deleuze does not ground knowledge in a human subject or restrict knowledge to representation, and this is what makes him so challenging as a so-called post-modern thinker: he is committed to metaphysics. However, we need to be attentive to the different components that make up Deleuze’s identity as a philosopher and work through them carefully, noting the ten- sions that his intellectual commitments give rise to, sometimes productively, at other times less so (one thinks, for example, of the extraordinary tension that exists between a commitment to Nietzscheanism and a commitment to Bergsonism). It is my hope that this chapter will at least serve to encour- age readers to re-think the appropriation of Deleuze by new materialism and to seriously consider ethical questions and normative issues.7 It is clear that Deleuze’s legacy to contemporary thought is a highly complex one. In terms of the “new materialism” it is important to appreciate that Deleuze was advocating such a materialism in the 1960s, based on classical sources. At the same time, it is important to recognize the value of the post-human turn and the attempt to naturalize the human and politics as we encoun- ter it in the work of Elizabeth Grosz: it contains important insights that can help cultivate novel ecological ways of thinking, and there can be little doubt that the eco-political crisis now facing the planet needs the resources of Deleuzian-inspired materialism if it is to be adequately thought through and engaged with. However, what cannot be so readily relinquished are the humanist elements of Deleuze’s Spinozism and its commitment to the tasks of demystification and human emancipation.

Notes 1 This is no doubt an oversimplification. However, I would maintain that at the heart of the book on Spinoza of 1968 is an ethical pedagogy and that its “humanist”­ orientation is widely neglected among commentators on Deleuze. For an anti- humanist reading of Deleuze’s 1960s “Spinoza,” see Peden 2014, chapter 6. 2 Typically Deluze is construed not as a new materialist but as a “new vitalist.” In ignorance of the fact that Deleuze actually deployed the term “new materialism” in his work on Spinoza in the 1960s, Coole and Frost (2010) bizarrely assert that, “Gilles Deleuze, whose work has been influential in much of the new ontol- ogy, did not count himself a materialist despite his radical empiricism and some evocative descriptions of materialization” (9). 3 It is perhaps interesting to note that Coole and Frost (2010), in their introduc- tion to their edited collection New Materialisms, speak of the interventions of the new materialists as “renewed materialisms” (6). In a recent contribution Claire Colebrook (2016) has argued that materialism “is always a turning back, is always part of a materialist turn, and is therefore always a ‘new’ materialism.” 4 This work pioneered the biophilosophical appreciation of Deleuze and influenced much of the new materialism, especially as Deleuze has inspired this materialism. Deleuze and New Materialism 107 5 “Substance first expresses itself in its attributes, each attribute expressing an essence. But then attributes express themselves in turn: they express themselves in their subordinate modes, each such mode expressing a modification of the attribute” (Deleuze 1992, 14). 6 For insight here see my essay “Affirmative Naturalism: Deleuze and Epicureanism” (2014). 7 Only recently has attention been devoted to raising questions about Deleuze as a normative thinker. As one commentator has noted, the moral and value-theoret- ical aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy have tended to be ignored or overshadowed by the ontological, historical, and political aspects (Jun 2011, 89). Along with other so-called “post-modern” thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault, Deleuze has been accused of moral relativism, scepticism, and even nihilism. In an essay entitled “Thinking and Normativity in Deleuze’s Philosophy,” which opens a collection of essays devoted to this topic, Anders Kristensen (2013) construes Deleuze as a normative thinker in the sense that he is never concerned merely with objective factual statements on the subjects he addresses: “the metaphys- ics of Deleuze aims at changing and not describing … the world in which we live” (11). “Metaphysical science,” as Deleuze’s project is described, is said to be normative in the sense that what we need and ought to think is to be invented: “It is this invention of new ground that makes it possible for a different way of thinking that can open new forms of action and belief” (12). For the importance of norms in Deleuze, see also Hughes 2012, esp. 144–46.

References Ansell-Pearson, Keith. 1999. Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze. London and New York: Routledge. Ansell-Pearson, Keith. 2014. “Affirmative Naturalism: Deleuze and Epicureanism.” Cosmos and History 10 (2): 121–137. Bergson, Henri. 1965. The Creative Mind. Translated by M. L. Andison. Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams & Co. Braidotti, Rosi. 2012. “Afterword: Complexity, Materialism, Difference.” Angelaki 17 (2): 169–176. Colebrook, Claire. Forthcoming 2017. “Materality.” In The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy. Edited by Ann Garry et al. London and New York: Routledge. Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. 2010. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, 1–47. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. DeBrabander, Firmin. 2007. Spinoza and the Stoics. London: Continuum Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. London: Continuum Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Deleuze, Gilles. (1953) 1991. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature. Translated by C.V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Translated by M. Joughin. New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Continuum Press. 108 Ansell-Pearson Dolphijn, Rick and Iris van der Tuin. 2011. “Pushing Dualism to an Extreme: On the Philosophical Impetus of a New Materialism.” Continental Philosophy Review 44: 383–400. Dolphijn, Rick and Iris van der Tuin. 2012. “Introduction: What May I Hope For?” In New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, 13–16. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2002. “A Politics of Imperceptibility: A response to ‘Anti-racism, multiculturalism and the ethics of identification.’” Philosophy and Social Criticism 28 (4): 463–72. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2011a. Becoming Undone. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2011b. “Matter, Life, and Other Variations.” Philosophy Today 55: 17–27. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2015. “Deleuze and the Nonhuman Turn: An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz.” In Deleuze and the Non/Human, edited by Jon Roffe and Hannah Stark, 17–25. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Han-Pile, Beatrice. 2010. “The ‘Death of Man’: Foucault and Anti-Humanism.” In Foucault and Philosophy, edited by Timothy O’ Leary and Christopher Falzon, 118–43. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Hayden, Patrick. 1998. Multiplicity and Becoming: The Pluralist Empiricism of Gilles Deleuze. New York: Peter Lang. Hughes, Joe. 2012. Philosophy after Deleuze. London and New York: Bloomsbury Press. Jun, Nathan. 2011. “Deleuze, Values, and Normativity.” In Deleuze and Ethics, edited by Nathan Jun and Daniel W. Smith, 89–107. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kisner, Matthew J. 2011. Spinoza on Human Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kristensen, Anders Raastrup. 2013. “Thinking Normativity in Deleuze’s Philosophy.” In Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Patricia Pisters, 11–24. London: Bloomsbury Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1969. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin. Peden, Knox. 2014. Spinoza contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sharp, Hasana. 2011. Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Spinoza, Baruch. 1996. The Ethics. Translated by Edwin Curley. London: Penguin. Wasser, Audrey. 2007. “Deleuze’s Expressionism.” Angelaki 12 (2): 49–66. Part II Humanities and the Sciences of Matter This page intentionally left blank 5 Materialism, Old and New, and the Party of Humanity

Catherine Wilson The Graduate Center CUNY/University of York

The “new materialism”1 dissociates itself both from Marxism and from the long superseded ontology of solid atoms and void that most ancient and some early modern materialists took to be exhaustive of reality. As Karen Barad (2007) points out, atoms are no longer conceived as “uncuttable little objects,” and the void is not nothing. “According to quantum field theory,” she comments, “the vacuum is … teeming with the full set of possibilities of what may come to be. Matter is regularly created and destroyed. And the zoo of subatomic particles—including electrons, quarks, positrons, anti- quarks, neutrinos, pion, gluons, and protons—isn’t comprised of simple, individual objects occupying specific positions in the vacuum we call space and time” (Barad 2007, 354). Like the old materialism, however, the new materialism demands philosophy’s engagement with the natural sciences, a sequel to the Kantian turn to “pure” philosophy that was followed by the linguistic turn of the last century, and the critique of science as ideology that was prominent in post-structuralism. Drawing on current biology and physics, the new materialism follows the old materialists in insisting on the spontaneity of matter, its capacity for self-organization, and its continuing production of new social and institutional as well as biological forms. The materialist regards political history, and the history of institutions, as ungoverned by any teleology, as a series of improvisational reactions to contingencies that may fall out of adjustment with present conditions. For the old materialists, our world, with its plants, animals, and humans, had emerged from chaos without divine planning or assistance. There were no gods, no heaven to hope for nor hell to fear. The invisible material particles of which the world was composed moved of their own accord, fell into the “habits” or “pacts” that sustained the ordinary course of nature, entering as well into new combinations in virtue of which the future was unpredictable. As Epicurus’ follower, the first-century BCE poet Titus Carus Lucretius, declared in his poem On the Nature of Things, “slavery, poverty and wealth, freedom, war, concord and all other things whose coming and going does not impair the essential nature of a thing,” are accidental, by which he meant, dependent on human practices, conventions, and perceptions (1994, 1:455–59). The mind, they said, was corporeal and perishable, and 112 Wilson the avoidance of mental and physical pain, “the cry of the flesh,”especially ­ cold, hunger, and injury, were the principal ethical priorities for them. The pursuit of pleasure was a close second. “I know not how to conceive the good,” Epicurus is reported to have said, “apart from the pleasures of taste, sexual pleasures, the pleasures of sound and the pleasures of beautiful form” (Diogenes Laertius 1931, 10:6). Epicureanism was the only school of ancient philosophy that allowed women as members. Not only in “folk metaphysics,” but also in such elite systems of philosophy as the Aristotelian, with its fundamental distinction between “matter” and “form,” women are seen as the bodies of the world, encumbered by their physiology, inert and uncreative, except in their role as the servants of men and the producers of other bodies. Epicurean metaphys- ics permitted no such cleavage between the matter and the spirit of human societies, and Lucretius, for all his anxieties about male–female relation- ships, recognized the power and beauty of women as the renewing force of his atomic universe. When Epicurean materialism reappeared as a live option in the mid-sev- enteenth century, it was as a politically and socially liberating philosophy, and one to which women felt at least initially a powerful attraction. With patriarchal theology and political philosophy dispelled as superstition and targeted as a source of cruelty and oppression, the old materialism attracted and inspired intellects of the caliber of Lucy Hutchinson, the first English translator of Lucretius, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn. In political theory, the materialist Thomas Hobbes rejected the divine right of kings and the theological basis of ethics and presented equality as the default condition of human beings and as one to be reinstated where possible. John Locke suggested, exciting widespread outrage on the part of theologians, that mat- ter might possess the power to live and to think when suitably organized. He argued on that basis for a plastic, corporeal mind, susceptible to the effects of experience and education. Hume dismantled the Argument from Design, striking a blow at priestcraft and metaphysical optimism. Across the channel, the materialism of the philosophes was allied to their critique of monarchy, aristocracy, and clerisy, their rejection of military glory and imperium, and their defense of sensuality. The “vital materialists” of eight- eenth-century France, Germany, Scotland, and England pursued the agenda of understanding the human being as a body capable of thought, movement, volition, and experience,2 a tradition continued in German experimental psychology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and carried forward in present-day research.3 John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, with their utilitarian reforms in jurisprudence, criminal justice, and the alleviation of poverty and sexual oppression, looked back, in Mill’s case explicitly, to Epicurus as their forerunner. When Marx and Engels devel- oped their version of “dialectical materialism,” taking traditional material- ist welfarism and the critique of religion and hierarchy into a new practical philosophy that theorized the relationship between the forces of production Materialism, Old and New 113 and the satisfaction of human needs, the laboring, and a large sector of the ­intellectual classes of Europe and America, came to stand solidly behind them (Howe and Coser 1957; Thompson 1992; Caute 1964). Materialism was accordingly the philosophy of what might be called the “party of humanity.” Its stance has historically been protective; it has rec- ognized and supported the interests of the ordinary men and women and the poor and vulnerable. The old materialists refused to see misery and oppression as consistent with divine justice and a Providential plan rather than as reflecting the various powers and choices of its human inhabitants. One might think in this connection of the commitment to civic peace of Hobbes and Spinoza;4 the rejection of militarism and conquest by Buffon and Diderot; the concern for the plight of the laborer and the condition of women shown by Marx and Engels, and Darwin’s detestation of slavery and his defense of charitable institutions for the diseased and insane regardless of their “fitness.” The this-world orientation of the atheist and mortalist and their sense of the fragility of the individual anchored an ethical stance that was both skeptical and compassionate. Despite this remarkable record, materialism has been argued to be a reductive, demeaning, pessimistic philosophy, oppressive to the human spirit, at every stage of its historical expression. The violent, corrupt, per- secutory Communist regimes that followed the Russian Revolution in the former Soviet Union and China and parts of Africa, and the profound reac- tion against them in the second half of the twentieth century, were taken as discrediting materialist philosophy. But from the beginning, human excep- tionalism has been the persistent motif of its critics, and they are numerous. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010) observe in their introduction to New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, philosophical reflection has favored the “immaterial things … language, consciousness, subjectivity, agency, mind, soul, also imagination, emotions, values, meaning, and so on. These have typically been presented as idealities fundamentally differ- ent from matter and valorized as superior to the baser desires of biological material or the inertia of physical stuff” (1–2). The canon of philosophy, from Plato and the Stoics to Kant and beyond, is antimaterialist and excep- tionalist, with the materialists to be found amongst the poets, the agitators, and the philosophically uncouth. Their critics have aimed to lift the mind from tiny bits of matter, perishables, animality, embarrassing bodies, and desires and inclinations, to the God, the soul, rationality, free will, and duty. Mogens Lærke’s essay in the present volume shows how Leibniz insisted that a theological framework, in which human beings bore a special rela- tionship to God unavailable to the rest of nature, was needed to support a decent moral and political order; the materialism of Hobbes, his critics thought, could only serve as the basis of an amoral, despotic, cynical regime. Kant criticized the Leibnizian reliance on speculative reason, but his over- all aim was parallel to Leibniz’s. Although he probably did not believe in a personal God or in an immortal, incorporeal soul, he was alarmed by what 114 Wilson he perceived as the libertine implications of Enlightenment ­materialism. The stated aim of the Critique of Pure Reason was the extermination of “materialism, fatalism, atheism, and free-thinking,” which, he warned readers in his Preface, like “fanaticism, and superstition,” could be “injuri- ous universally” (Kant 1965, xxxiv). Leibniz had promoted his optimistic metaphysics and panvitalism by undermining the foundations of Gassendist and Cartesian science, to show that, not only “matter” and “motion,” but even “force,” were derivative rather than fundamental ontological notions, requiring to be understood by reference to nonmaterial “monadic” reality. Kant promoted his moral and political views by presenting the Newtonian scheme of material particles and experimentally determinable active powers as incomplete. A nonmaterial noumenon, and a force—free will—had to be taken as underlying the appearances. His critical metaphysics enabled him to differentiate sharply between “man” as an animal whose behavior and motivations could be studied empirically and “man” as a rational being whose motivational set extended beyond the pushes and pulls of desire and aversion by which all other animals were presumably governed. The assertion of human exceptionalism and its relationship to incorporeals and higher things was already manifest in Socrates’ critique of Anaxagoras,5 who, Socrates believed, failed to distinguish between mentalistic reasons and physicalistic causes. This remains a key distinction for all who suppose the Geisteswissenschaften and the Naturwissenschaften to employ distinct and irreconcilable conceptual frameworks. The breadth, depth, and persistence of this historical dialectic is as con- sequential for new materialism as it was for the old. New materialism is tasked not only with explaining how it differs from the images of the world it is rejecting and replacing, but also how its “posthumanist” perspec- tive relates it to philosophy and the traditional Geisteswissenschaften. As Christian Emden argues in his essay for this volume, the problem of moral and political normativity is seriously undertheorized within new material- ism, even as it presents posthumanism as an ethical, indeed salvationist, cultural intervention. New materialists are prone to declare, rather than to argue explicitly for, an intrinsic connection between the metaphysics of self- organization, indeterministic spontaneity, and progressive moral thinking on animal welfare, global inequality, gender, and climate change. The con- nection has not been thoroughly discussed in new materialist writing, though the sense that the ironic, playful, text-oriented sallies of deconstructivists and postmodernists have been inadequate responses to the urgent problems of environmental degradation, global immiseration, holy war, and genetic and robotic engineering comes through in their writing. Emden implicitly asks how, without some grasp of human exceptionalism, we might try to justify, or even just identify, progressive political values. Nevertheless, the historiography of philosophy encourages the hope that we can fashion some kind of persuasive link between ontology and value. Lærke suggests, for example, that we might look to Spinoza and to the possibility of “a genuine Materialism, Old and New 115 metaphysical middle ground” between materialism and idealism for a “third way” solution­ to the problem of the foundations of political authority as it appears in the contest between Hobbes and Leibniz (262). Lærke’s discussion suggests that it might be through a consideration of the views of contemporary critics of materialism, rather than by focusing on its defenders, that we can see the way forward. In this chapter, I want to examine several new instances of the old dialectic: the quarrel over the rele- vance of the neurosciences for understanding the human mind, the perceived threat of “scientism” in the humanities and in the general culture, and the problem of normativity. I will examine the issue of resistance to the materi- alistic stance and the defense of human exceptionalism through an examina- tion of the important dialogue published in 1998 under the title Ce qui nous fait penser: la Nature et la règle, translated as What Makes Us Think? In this exchange, the French phenomenologist, Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), engaged in a conversation with Jean-Pierre Changeux, a neurobiologist, over the issues of the explanation of consciousness and volition, the origins of morality, and the relevance of the neurosciences for the solution of political problems, which, even before the events of 2001 which have so altered the face of modern life, loomed large in Changeux’s mind. The published dia- logue illustrates how the fear of reductionism and scientism remains alive. At just the moment in which some aspects of the problems of conscious awareness and attention, belief and delusion, perception and the sense of self appear to be yielding to analysis in terms of neurological structures and processes, philosophers have mounted a counter-movement to argue that, along with the notions of intentionality, linguistic meaning, truth, and veridicality, our concepts of value are transcendental ideas that cannot be captured empirically.6 At just the moment in which we are coming to under- stand the evolutionary origins of morality and their implications for law and custom, the psychology and sociology of militarism and terrorism, reli- gious ideation, and the role of emotions in moral judgment, we are endlessly reminded that “ought” can never be derived logically and uncontroversially from “is.” These claims are surely true: the sciences cannot tell us what is good, true, and beautiful, only what certain populations judge to be so and perhaps why they do. Yet the proposition that ethics and the philosophy of mind can effectively proceed by shutting themselves off from the empirical sciences, remaining the closed disciplines suggested by the “linguistic turn” of the last century, is untenable. Changeux is adamant that what might be called the “party of humanity” can no longer rely exclusively on the literary and philosophical texts so central to the work of Ricoeur, a philosopher steeped in the tradition of Kant, to whom he frequently and admiringly refers, along with Sartre, Husserl, and Heidegger. Changeux insists that the understand- ing of our mental lives will be immeasurably deepened by the progress of the neurosciences with repercussions for moral thought and the evolution of politics, allying himself with the critical and constructive projects of ancient 116 Wilson and Enlightenment materialism. New materialists may also be able to take some lessons from his endeavor in formulating their replies to the positivist accusation that new materialist ontology is metaphysical—and poetically discoursed of—but negligible as a cultural force.

I While Ricoeur denies that he is a substance dualist in the sense of Descartes, he emphasizes in the text under consideration a number of what he consid- ers to be distinct, irreconcilable perspectives. He repeatedly contrasts the first-person phenomenological approach of sensitive introspective reporting of what happens in the mind with the third-person description of anatomi- cal structures and physiological processes in the brain, arguing that there is not, and by implication never can be, a bridge from the latter to the former. There are two discourses, he says, that cannot be superseded by a third. “In the one case it is a question of neurons and their connection in a system; in the other one speaks of knowledge, action, feeling—acts or states character- ized by intentions, motivations, and values” (Changeux and Ricoeur [1998] 2002, 14). He goes on to contrast the neutrality of evolutionary theory with the human demand for purposiveness and progress, and finally he contrasts, following Kant, human nature, as characterized by radical evil, with the good and the right of moral and political theory. To summarize the main points of his skepticism, for Ricoeur, the neuro- sciences can only correlate experiences with brain states but can never enhance our understanding of the mind. The notions of “meaning” and “meaning- fulness” cannot be understood in physiological terms. Further, the scientific study of morality and its origins in our nonhuman ancestors can never bridge the divide between “is” and “ought.” Ricoeur concludes that we understand, and by implication always will understand, the human condition “much more through the reflection of moralists, through literature—the Novel—than through the neurosciences” (Changeux and Ricoeur [1998] 2002, 197). There is nothing philosophically new about the point that one could know everything there is to know about the anatomy of the brain and the physiology of the synapses and still not be able to explain consciousness in such a way as to give us a feeling that we now understand how it occurs in the same way that we can be brought to understand, for example, the replication of a strand of DNA.7 Leibniz ([1714] 1989) invited his readers in 1714 to imagine a brain that had the power to perceive and think thanks to its mechanism and that was blown up to the size of a mill (Monadology section 17, p. 215). We could walk around in it and observe the wheels and gears in action, Leibniz argued, but we would never be able to understand how its parts produced experience and thinking. Replace the wheels and gears with neurons, neurotransmitters, and changes in electrical potential and we still cannot “see” consciousness being produced. The phenomeno- logical method, Ricoeur maintains, and he is hardly alone on this issue, is Materialism, Old and New 117 the only one suited to a more comprehensive and precise understanding of conscious mental processes. Changeux’s response is to insist that the demand to see how conscious- ness is produced is inappropriate. The onslaught on the problem is gradual and multifaceted; the problem has to be reduced to a set of more isolat- able and tractable problems. The progress of science, one might add, has always depended, not only on the development of theories and the devising of experiments, but also the invention of new instruments, and modes of recording and analyzing. Changeux cites five innovations of the last century or so that he argues have in fact led to a better understanding of conscious experience. These innovations are the concept of projection, the study of dysfunction, imaging, electrophysiological experimentation, and the use of psychotropic agents. To these five, we need to add recent attempts to under- stand consciousness as a mode of attention-management. To begin with projection. Perception, as we now understand it, rather than involving a process of copying the object or events perceived onto a mental canvas, is a process of construction involving innate expectations, hypothesis-formation, anticipation, integration, and memory. As Brian J. Scholl (2005) expresses it:

Visual perception is the process of recovering useful information about the structure of the world, based on the shifting patterns of light that enter the eyes. Perhaps the most fundamental fact about visual percep- tion is that this task is, strictly speaking, impossible … there are always a multitude of possible structures in the world that could have given rise to those same patterns of light. In this sense the visual system must solve an “inverse problem,” which is technically not possible via deduc- tive inference. (40–41)

Shape and color are processed via separate channels, and we are attentive only to a small portion of the visual field, the rest of which is “filled in” by memory. The world does not come to us “prelabelled.” As Changeux puts it, “the Universe does not send us coded messages.” At the same time, we appear to be prewired, if not for the rapid identification of certain categories of object, at least for the propensity rapidly to form categories. Different cortical areas “respond differently to humans, animals, fruits and vegeta- bles, and artifacts” (Changeux and Ricoeur [1998] 2002, 106). The phe- nomenologist will of course have a good deal to say about the ways in which we respond to items in these categories. In this regard, the discovery of the cortical basis for the importance of these categories of object confirms the sensitivity of the phenomenological method. Attention has focused recently on the contribution “qualia,” as opposed to complex stimulus–response algorithms, might make to evolutionary suc- cess in animal species (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1997).8 Awareness of 118 Wilson a “world” is no longer considered an exclusively human attribute, and the hypothesis that it extends very far down the phylogenetic scale to animals that do not possess a cerebral cortex has received new support. In 1850, Félix Dujardin discovered the “mushroom bodies” in invertebrates that are responsible for integrating sensory information regarding, taste, smell, tex- ture, and vision and that enable memory, learning, navigation, foraging, and social behavior, exploitative (as in parasitism) as well as co-operative. The mushroom bodies are supposed to have arisen from the common ancestor of themselves and the vertebrate brain (Dujardin 1995, 350). The second important discovery cited by Changeux is that of the struc- tural–functional relationship between experiential and behavioral dysfunc- tion and lesions on the brain or disruptions of the communication between neurons mediated by neurotransmitters such as dopamine. Some of the pathologies studied include the loss of one’s mother tongue (sometimes accompanied by the retention of a second, learned language); the inability to recognize faces; Chagrass syndrome—the impression that family mem- bers are strangers; “neglect” of portions of the visual field; phantom limbs (noted already by Descartes); confabulation, whereby patients invent stories to cover for their deficits; the absence of emotional responses in rational and intelligent persons; impaired social relations in autistic persons; murderous psychopathology; Tourette’s syndrome; and “blindsight,” in which the sub- ject can respond to the external world but seems to lack visual experience, and, correspondingly, hallucinations of vision, audition, smell, and taste. For Ricoeur, these neuroscientific studies again present only correlations between brain states and experiences and moreover do not shed light on what he calls “felicitous” experience; the experience of subjects not suffer- ing from these dysfunctions, in which the phenomenological method is espe- cially interested. This objection is reminiscent of early critics of experimental science who argued that in the laboratory, Nature does not show herself in her usual mode of operation, which is what interests or ought to interest us. The Baconian answer to this was that one must “vex” nature to learn any- thing from her. Again, what studies of pathologies and dysfunctions show is that what we take to be something unitary—experiencing and acting in the world—is made up of a set of competencies, some of which may fall out without affecting the others. We can anticipate that further research will subdivide these competencies even further; in the meantime, we do under- stand consciousness better by coming to see the range of capabilities that being conscious implies, and the sorts of incompetencies it excludes. As well as projection, there is imaging via PET and MRI and electro- physiological stimulation. These techniques also localize particular kinds of experience to particular regions and are accordingly less than “explana- tory” for Ricoeur. When Changeux describes and illustrates the changes in the monkey’s cortex when it sees a human face or the face of another monkey, Ricoeur asks whether this “helps to decipher the enigma of a face. Do you believe that you understand the faces of others in the street, in your Materialism, Old and New 119 family, because you know something about what happens in their brain?” (Changeux and Ricoeur [1998] 2002, 102). Not exactly, one would have to reply, but the discovery that slight changes in the physical parameters of faces generate a large response in the cortex indicates how important to us and to other primate species the ability to detect the emotional states of others is. Such imaging studies are illuminating when they are correlated to competencies and deficits because they erode the impression that there are some acts of the mind—such as “willing,” “understanding a word,” and “recognizing”—that are pure mental acts, acts of intentionality, with no neurological underpinnings or at least none that can be experimentally investigated. The differences between dreaming, imagining, experiencing, and hallucinating can be explored along with their common elements. Finally, there was the discovery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of hallucinogenic agents long known to native people who consumed and still consume certain mushrooms and the peyote cactus, or other alka- loids, for their effects on perception, emotion, and cognition. Hallucinogenic experiences occurred to sufferers from ergot poisoning (a form of LSD) in the Middle Ages, and humanity has amassed a wealth of experience and know­ ledge related to the preparation and effects of analgesics, stimulants, and sleeping draughts, such as opium, coca, salicylic acid, cannabis, and alcohol. As researchers begin to understand which pathways and which neurotrans- mitters and receptors these drugs affect and how states of high alertness and dimmed perception are related to them, we come to understand consciousness better. The hallucinogens provide a fascinating glimpse into the operations of the visual system when it is taken partially offline and relieved of the task of constructing the “practical” image of reality needed for getting around effec- tively in the world. Changeux argues that we need to attend to the “spontane- ous” activity of the brain. In what way do its random processes and its offline activities not only consolidate knowledge, but also underlie what we think of as creativity in the intellectual and artistic realms? The correlation problem has still not been solved, you might think. There seems to be a paradox that Gibsonian proponents of “direct perception” have pointed out. We conceptualize an animal as walking on the ground in direct contact with its environment, but as perceiving, via some sort of pro- jection device, an internal “idea” that somehow “represents” the environ- ment after processing a visual stimulus. But in both cases the animal is doing the same thing, obtaining information by means of feet and eyes relevant to its behavior (Gibson 1979). We cannot understand consciousness with what are essentially seventeenth-century notions of mechanical causation in which the eye and visual system function as a camera that projects an image. Consciousness is not an effect produced by neurons—or neurons active in some turned-on part of the brain. It is possible that we may need to turn to entirely different models of information, its collection and deployment, to understand sensory awareness, including some that are impossible to grasp intuitively. David Chalmers and Galen Strawson both seem to take the view 120 Wilson that consciousness is a basic feature of reality manifesting itself throughout the physical universe, not only a late-appearing biological phenomenon that is the product of natural selection on earth.9 Max Tegmark suggests that consciousness is a “fourth phase” of matter in addition to solid, liquid, and gaseous.10 He explains this by means of mathematical diagrams that no one can translate into common-sense vocabulary. When philosophers maintain that no account of consciousness that will make sense to the educated layperson or indeed to the majority of scien- tists is to be expected, they may be right: the basis of consciousness may be impossible to grasp by minds adapted to a Euclidean world of mechanical causes and effects. Yet one might also think of the fraught eighteenth-century discussions of creationism. A century before Darwin wrote, important non- creationist accounts—rough variation-and-selection models and effect-of- the-environment models—of the appearance of life and of an array of species were proposed by materialist philosophers. These accounts seemed wildly farfetched to those who encountered them. Yet they were the ancestors of the theory that we do accept (with modifications), Darwinian evolution sup- plemented by other processes and mechanisms. The provision of a new anal- ogy—Darwin’s “breeder” analogy (Cornell 1984)—made this possible.

II In the later sections of the book, the Changeux-Ricoeur dialogue turns to morality and the presumed abyss between “is” and “ought.” How can the discovery of what happens in the brain when people make moral decisions, or how they judge and behave in experimental situations testing their altru- ism or sense of fairness, or their “implicit biases” contribute to the reso- lution of moral dilemmas or suggest ways of educating people to be less morally irresponsible? As Hume pointed out and as Emden reminds us, there is no valid way to infer what people ought to do, or one ought to force or encourage them to do, from facts about human psychology or the world (Hume 1978).11 The discussion of informant reactions to “trolley problems” and behavior in simple bargaining games that currently constitute the main experimental approaches to morality seem to promise little by way of new tools to address either the moral troubles of individuals in modern mass society or the social and political problems of modernity, including cor- ruption, genocide, imperialism, oligarchy, sexual subordination, and other large-scale evils. The array of responses to the question “Would you push one fat man off a bridge to stop a runaway trolley and save five lives?” sheds no real light on dilemmas involving sacrifice and dirty hands, as the array of responses in bargaining games to the question “Would you accept a 60 (me)–40 (you) division of $10.00 if offered? How about an 80–20?” sheds no real light on exploitation, economic inequality, and deprivation. The conclusions of “experimental ethics” as practiced in the last decade are arguably demoralizing in and of themselves (Machery 2010). Materialism, Old and New 121 Ricoeur asks what the neurosciences could possibly add where moral ­theory is concerned to the reflections and presentations of novelists, dram- atists, and philosophical moralists. He is surely right to suggest that we should not underestimate the effect that fiction and philosophy have had on our interpretations of the social world and the reform of its institutions. But if there is an “is-to-ought” problem for scientific facts, there is an even more serious problem of inference for fiction and a priori speculation. Literature assuredly treats of morals and politics. Moral dilemmas and political events form the backbone of most novels. But how is this supposed to help? How can the merely possible “ises” of narrative fiction, or the unproved theories of the rival schools of the moralists, generate any “oughts”? We can learn from fiction what people consider to be problems in their lives. The major emotion-unleashing events are made highly salient. For children and adoles- cents, their first experiences of love and grief actually arise in their reading or film-going. (The neuroscientist will tell us that their brains may be perma- nently rewired as a result.) We also learn about possible ways of responding to life’s problems and possible effects of, and responses to, emotion. But the implicit “ought” claims of the writers of fictions and the explicit injunctions of moral philosophers obtain credibility only to the extent that we take them to be keen observers of the social world, who actually understand reality in an anthropologically, economically, psychologically sound way. If they have only created plausible fictions, their implied “oughts” are unreliable. Only slightly more reliable is the advice given by the supposedly wise experts who write newspaper columns. Surely it would better for the “oughts” to link in some manner to what we can experimentally or observationally establish by critical means than to link to imagination and fantasy, or to what writers and readers assess as plausible. For Ricoeur, our star and compass in morality is Kant, specifically his belief that while human beings are possessed of “radical evil,” there is also a kind of responsiveness to the good in us and that rationality provides a means of giving it expression and power. But one has to ask—is this Kantian philosophical schema, taken together with the inventions of the poets, dram- atists, and novelists—really the key to the solution of the social and personal moral problems of modernity? Can we really adopt Kant’s twin views that the duties of morality are grounded in reason and free will that must be pos- ited of our entire species and that the most hardened-by-his-environment or badly wired criminal is at the same time fully responsible for his actions and deserving of punishment? In defense of Ricoeur’s position, it needs to be said that the advantage possessed by the humanistic disciplines when it comes to their relevance for moral thought is that they are narrative. They deal with the lives of minded beings, construed as sequences of causes and effects, extending from a distant past to a probable distant future, where the causes are agent-initi- ated actions and the effects have emotional resonance and a broader social impact that makes them “moral tales.”12 The narrative possesses an overall 122 Wilson shape that is producible and intelligible thanks to the absorption of other age-old narratives of myth and legend. The study of behavior in a laboratory experiment lasting an hour or two cannot connect to the deep temporality and spatiality of moral agency. Experiments and surveys cannot, it seems, reveal the personal development people experience over the course of the life cycle, nor the emotional ambivalence, and the extremes of malice, generos- ity, and idealism to which people can be driven in real life, that literature portrays so vividly (Mar and Oatley 2008). Nevertheless, the results of the neurosciences and the behavioral sciences that assume continuity between man and the other animals are having an effect on the social understanding of the “oughts” as they begin to penetrate sociology and economics. There has been a return to Darwinian explana- tions of human moral sensibility, or what Darwin called “conscience,” and its similarities and differences to the social dispositions and co-operative efforts of nonhuman animals. These enquiries have furnished a powerful corrective to the dominant ideology of “economic man,” alleged to make all decisions according to his self-interest, which in turn is identified with the accumulation of goods and the enjoyment of leisure. Ignoring trolleys, fat men, and bridges, Changeux cites a raft of experiments that reveal the underlying disposition to sympathetic identification with others as a pow- erful human trait. They have shown, for example, the preferences of ten month old babies for brightly colored balls that help and caress versus balls that bump and interfere. Somewhere between the ages of four and seven, he reports, the normal child becomes sensitive to the effects of its own violence and aggression and develops inhibitions; the child who may develop sociopathic or even criminally psychopathic behaviour in later life does not (Changeux and Ricoeur [1998] 2002, 156–57). At the same time, we are familiar with experiments that show the willingness of people to perpetrate violence when ordered to do so by credible figures, as happened in the Milgram experiments, and that demonstrate the indifference of even theology students who have just been asked to prepare a text on the Good Samaritan to a “wounded” decoy, in case (they believe) they are late for an appointment (Harman 1999). Rather than interpreting these conflicting results regarding altruism and selfishness in Kantian terms as the operations, now of a supernatural, now of a natural, element within us respectively, the scientific approach asks us to investigate the co-existence of these two sets of “natural” motivation, as elicited by different cues in the context in which they are experienced. Our scientific attention to sympathy, as Ricoeur acutely points out, seems to have emerged at just the moment when rapacious capitalism has revealed its dismaying effects (Changeux and Ricoeur [1998] 2002, 192). There is more notice of, more media attention paid to, stories about altruism and peace-making amongst primates and humans, by contrast with the empha- sis on territoriality and aggression that dominated the popular ethological literature in the 1950s and 1960s. Economists are revising their notion that Materialism, Old and New 123 the “rational,” self-interested, profit-seeking man who operates in their ­modeling can actually predict human behavior. Even in artificial experimen- tal situations as well as in real life, people are motivated as much by identities and commitments, and notions of fairness, as by considerations of profit.13 That there is no possible logical inference from “is” to “ought” does not mean that new facts cannot motivate important social change. If it is widely believed that “you can’t change human nature” and that human nature is basically characterized by ambition, greed, aggression, sexism, and racism, pundits and philosophers’ criticisms of the moral vices will appear to be wishful thinking. If it is recognized that human nature is not “evil” but that human beings are liable to form and retain markedly irrational as well as empirically false beliefs and are prone to the formation of inconsistent preference-sets, we can hope gradually to remedy some of the moral and social tangles of modernity as we come to understand better these features of our mentality via experimental enquiry. Changeux argues finally (in a thoroughly Lucretian vein) that religion has been a divisive force throughout history. The Christian religion of love, praised by Ricoeur, has, he says, “subjected a sizable fraction of humanity to sexual repression. The Churches did not break the chains of slavery, defend the equality of rights, or offer liberty to mankind. It was the revolutionaries of 1789 acting against the church” (Changeux and Ricoeur [1998] 2002, 277), inflamed by anti-clericalism and inspired by the materialism of the radical philosophers that initiated the slow transfor- mations of modernity in Continental Europe, Britain, and America involv- ing human rights. Changeux points out that the genuinely ethical and on the whole univer- sal component of religion is typically swamped by its identity and differen- tiation components based on symbols and prohibitions. Confusion arises between the adherence to noble ideals and “the wearing of beards or veils or hats, dietary habits, rituals and signs, crossing oneself, going to church or temple … and so on” (Changeux and Ricoeur [1998] 2002, 234). Young children can distinguish between such rules of private life, which they may think of as given by God, and moral rules proper, which are not of divine origin, but form part of what might be called the natural law. Adults seem to lose this distinction, giving rise to serious conflicts in which “circumstantial social conventions prevail over moral obligations” (235). Disgust comes to be associated with the appearance and practices of the other, fueling vio- lence. Changeux insists that “We need to distinguish ‘the imaginary, the mythical, the contingent which in varying proportions are present in every cultural tradition from the body of moral sentiments peculiar to the human species” (236). To conclude, Paul Ricoeur might have put his case better against what is today called scientism than against the natural and human sci- ences. Scientism is characterized by Tom Sorell (1994) as the view that the sciences form a unified body of knowledge that is comprehensive and 124 Wilson authoritative and that ought to be relied upon as the preeminent guide to the problems of human life and society (1–18). Materialism, whether old or new, should not be confused with scientism. The old materialists did not, for the most part, envision an application of scientific knowledge to technology as the solution of all human ills; rather, their ontology pro- vided them with a critical stance towards institutions and practices, and a form of compassion deriving from their belief in the underlying unity of life. Unlike the proponent of scientism, neither the old nor the new mate- rialist has any need to rank discourses and disciplines in terms of their absolute value—neither science nor the humanities are overall “better.” The danger for the party of humanity that worried Ricoeur, and the real, as opposed to the apparent, losses and threats that many of us sense in the theoretically and technologically successful culture of modern science, do not lurk in its ontological assumptions and the ways in which these have been developed. The scientist who arouses moral dismay is not the materi- alist who claims that the brain and body are responsible for all experience, emotion, and volition, or who looks to biology, psychology, and anthro- pology in an effort to better understand the foundations of morality, but the investigator who refuses to reflect on the ethical significance of their activities. Scientism offers both a permission to practicing scientists to refrain from moral reflection on what they are doing and an incitement to exaggerate its utility. All too often, the division of labor between science and legislation produces, on one hand, indifference on the part of practicing scientists to the uses to which the results of their allegedly pure enquiry will be put, and, on the other, a political and commercial control of science, directing vast sums to weapons and profit. The effort to reanimate the old forms of myste- rianism and dualism in philosophy does not address the very real threat we face from the isolation of scientific practice from moral accountability. The question now is whether new materialism, with its hopeful practical agenda, can speak fruitfully and persuasively to the very different political issues of the twenty-first century.

III The Hobbes scholar Samantha Frost (2011) argues that the thesis of “active matter” in new materialism furnishes powerful resources for epistemology and social criticism. Jane Bennett (2009) concurs:

The image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consump- tion. It does so by preventing us from detecting … a fuller range of nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies. These material powers which can aid or destroy, enrich or disable, enoble or degrade us, in any case call for our attentiveness, or even ‘respect.’ (ix) Materialism, Old and New 125 The figure of dead matter, she goes on to say, was “one of the impediments to the emergence of more ecological and more materially sustainable modes of ­production and consumption” (ix). Angie Willey (this volume, 134) concurs: “Positioned both against an imagined ‘old materialism’ … and against an ‘anti-materialist’ humani- ties, the ‘new’ in new materialism holds out the promise not only of ‘new’ epistemological approaches to ‘nature,’ but indeed of new ontologies: new becomings, new worlds.” But what are these resources, and are any of them specific to new materialism, except insofar as it is more science- friendly than the traditional humanities? The social and political prob- lems of post-modernity—including oil production, pollution and toxins in food, antibiotic resistance, sex trafficking, mass extinction, bombs, the flow of capital and population, have a material feel to them. But as noted, the relationship between fundamental ontology and social and political value needs to be constructed rather than simply asserted. Fascism,14 dual- istic gender roles,15 and exploitative practices are, after all, spontaneously emerging phenomena and have at one time or another been argued to be life-affirming and celebratory of nature’s vitality (Wilson 2013). If the new materialists are persuaded that such formations can in fact only be defended on the basis of antimaterialist abstracta and fictions ungrounded in physics, biology, and the more scientific social sciences, the argument will need to be made more directly. Willey points to the improved under- standing of our causal impact on the world in the Anthropocene that the study of climate and biodiversity have brought us, and to contributions of modern biology in the study of gender and race, which have refuted some forms of biological essentialism. Most promising, in her view, is relief from the “gendered devaluation of nature” of traditional philosophy and reli- gion (Willey, 146). This suggestion is surely on the right track. It needs to be pointed out first in this connection that it is historiographically incorrect to associate the thesis of “dead matter” with the old materialism. The inertness of mat- ter was rather a thesis favored by philosophical dualists, including Plato and Descartes, who argued that a spiritual principle was required to bring movement, change, and agency into the world. The Epicureans and their later followers down to the nineteenth century, by contrast, maintained that material nature was able to produce the phenomena, including the phenomena of life, mentality, and evolutionary change, without any such supplementation. All the same, as noted in Section I, as well as through its religion-critique, the old materialism effected the transition from natural to normative philosophy by arguing that existing practices including the claus- tration of women, warfare, aristocratic privilege, and economic oppression were not to be found amongst the rerum naturae, as the majority of ancient philosophers maintained. Rather, they represented inventions, conven- tions, and decisions, established or taken as a result of contingent historical developments and bearing no relation to eternal verities or transcendental 126 Wilson purposes. The “things of nature”—the true primordia rerum—did not include the “accidents” of good and evil, higher and lower, superior and inferior, which were held to exist in appearance only and observed to take on multiple forms in various regimes. The challenge to institutions and practices as conventional rather than natural is not, however, the basis implied in new materialism, which has been critical of social constructivist theses. The suggestion that the subor- dination of women is a result of “conditioning,” for example, no longer seems as obvious as it did fifty years ago. The view that the increasing con- centration of wealth among the few and the despoiling of the planet are transitional phenomena of late capitalism, whose “contradictions” or inter- nal instability will eliminate them in favor of more viable forms, runs up against the observation that the immiseration and slaughter of the innocent will assume massive, morally intolerable proportions before their successor forms appear on the horizon. The old materialism nevertheless contained other resources besides a con- ventionalist account of social practices for effecting the transition from “is” to “ought,” and for defending its particular concerns. They are relevant for the new materialism as well. As Emden suggests, normativity comes into the world simultaneously with life and as spontaneously. As living organisms that can maintain themselves in an ecological niche long enough to repro- duce emerge from the chemical soup, the notions of “good for” and “bad for” gain an application. It is not bad for a crystal to be smashed or to fail to grow larger, or even for an iceberg to shear off and fall into the sea, but it is bad for a cell to have its wall or membrane breached and bad for a plant to have its growth impeded by drought. Increasing degrees of complexity of social organization introduce and reveal new forms of “goodness” and “badness” in relation to needs, desires, and powers as they exist in particu- lar environments. The posthumanist perspective, in asserting the unity of life and its rela- tionship to, but also its distinction from, inorganic nature, accordingly has a coherent story about how values come into the world. The notion of moral responsibility, however, cannot be extracted from the thesis of the unity of life, since even where the good is pursued and enjoyed by nonhuman animals, they are not the bearers of responsibility. This point was made repeatedly albeit somewhat crudely by the old antimaterialists with their insistence that humans were set apart from the other animals by their rela- tionship to the divine or to divinities, by their incorporeal souls, or their rational faculty which recognized and responded to their duties. Only such experience-transcendent concepts, they maintained, could explain the tissue of responsibility-related concepts: obedience, ultimate justice, and the inhi- bition of vital striving and the sacrifice of biologically mandated goals that is seen in the most heroic examples of moral effort. In response to this challenge, a new materialist might argue as follows: antimaterialist philosophy from Aristotle to Kant coded moral responsibility Materialism, Old and New 127 as an attribute of male citizens. The others, as Grosz (2011) suggests, ­animals, slaves, women, children, and foreigners, insofar as they lacked social power and were perceived as lacking intellectual power, either could not or did not possess it, insofar as they did not participate in weighty decision making and did not need to (12). Their role in the polis was purely supportive, or in the case of male children of citizens, deferred. A naturalistic understanding of the sources and grounds of responsibility as an emergent feature displaces this understanding, without retreating to a mysterian exceptionalism. Moral conscience, a feature to which Darwin attached great significance, is as far as we know unique to human beings, but its precursors can be found in our evolutionary ancestors. The human brain, with its large frontal cortex, is not only specialized for impulse control, but is capable of envisioning alternative courses of action, predicting consequences, inventing new technologies, and performing linguistic actions such as declar- ing war that can alter cultural practises overnight. Freed to a greater extent than any other species from biologically obligate modes of association, pro- duction, and consumption, human animals have to decide on the social, as well as the personal level, what they are going to do next. Moral and political responsibility follows from the combination of the exaggerated, but ana- tomically and physiologically grounded, power of the human animal and the inescapability of making choices. Barad’s “agential realism” (2007, passim) and Lenny Moss’ account of degrees of freedom (this volume) suggest that the power to decide and to follow through on decisions is gradually acquired as we move up the phylogenetic scale, and is distributed. As recently as fifty years ago, we rarely thought of moral responsibility in terms of our relationship to things: the foods and chemical substances we ingest and breathe, the manufactured goods we purchase and discard, the landscapes and habitats our habits destroy. The new materialism confirms and endorses these new preoccupations. Despairing of the world handed to us by those men in suits who believed themselves supremely rational and favored by the gods, the new materialism implicitly assigns distrib- uted responsibility on the part of women, children, soldiers, and workers and their allies, including the suited ones, for re-imagining and revising the way we live now. In valorizing nature as creative, innovative, and, as Grosz (2011) reminds us, beauty-generating “active matter,” the new materialism has taught us that injury to the body of the world is as wrong as injury to the body of the human being (chapter 8).

Notes 1 Representatively, see Coole and Frost 2010; Barad 2007; Elisabeth Grosz 2011. 2 On eighteenth-century “vital materialism” and its reception, see Zammito, forth- coming, and Wolfe, this volume. 3 See the early chapters of Mandler 2007. 4 See the discussion of Lærke, this volume; Spinoza was not a materialist, but in his radical rejection of dualism and theism he was widely understood as one. 128 Wilson His reception in this regard has been documented by Jonathan Israel, especially in Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (2000). 5 Plato, Phaedo, 95–100. 6 Some prominent examples of resistance include the “mysterianism” of Colin McGinn (1999); the “naturalistic dualism” of David Chalmers (1997); Alva Noë (2015); and the recent criticisms of evolutionary psychology, neuroethics, and neuroaesthetics by Roger Scruton (2014). 7 Galen Strawson (27 Feb. 2015) has recently reminded his contemporaries that the “hard problem” of consciousness was not invented by contemporary mys- terians and dualists but was already familiar to every major philosopher of the seventeenth century. 8 See also Earl 2014. 9 See Chalmers 1997; Strawson 2006; cf. Wilson 2006. 10 For the mathematical-physical presentation, see Tegmark 27 Feb. 2014. 11 Hume 1978, Book 3, Part 1, Chapter 1, Section 27. Hume nevertheless argues that female chastity is desirable on the grounds of the facts of maternity, pater- nity, and economics, and that suicide is permissible on the grounds that self- destruction is obedience to the laws of nature. His entire account of morality as facilitating cooperation and reducing wasteful social friction is obviously an attempt to derive (though not infer) ought from is. 12 For an argument that moral responsibility requires a historical and thus narrative sense of self, see Schechtman 2014. For an influential defense of literature’s moral power, see Nussbaum 1985. 13 This was pointed out by Amartya Sen (1977). It has inspired the development of an empirical school of “Behavioural Economics.” See for an overview Kahneman 2003. 14 See the essays in the special issue on “Fascism and Nature,” Modern Italy (2014, 19[3]); and Biehl and Staudenmaier 1995. 15 For example, while the technical literature on mating strategies in evolutionary theory recognizes an array of effective strategies pursued by behaviorally flexible males and females (v. Shuster and Wade 2003), journalism extracts a ­neo-essentialist account of male and female behaviour, supposedly directed by “selfish genes.”

References Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter. A political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Biehl, Janet and Peter Staudenmaier. 1995. Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience. Edinburgh: AK Press. Caute, David. 1964. Communism and the French Intellectuals, 1914–1960. New York: Macmillan. Chalmers, David. 1997. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Changeux, Jean-Pierre and Paul Ricoeur. (1998) 2002. What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain. Translated by M.B. Debevoise. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cornell, John. 1984. “Analogy and Technology in Darwin’s Vision of Nature.” Journal of the History of Biology 17: 303–44. Materialism, Old and New 129 Diogenes Laertius. 1931. “Epicurus.” In Lives of Eminent Philosophers, translated by R.D. Hicks, Volume 10. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dujardin, Felix. 1995. The Nervous Systems of Invertebrates: An Evolutionary and Comparative Approach. Edited by O. Breidbach and W. Kutsch. Basel: Birkhauser. Earl, Brian. 2014. “The Biological Function of Consciousness.” Frontiers in Psychology 5: 697. Frost, Samantha. 2011. “The Implications of the New Materialisms for Feminist Epistemology.” In Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, edited by Heidi Grasswick, 69–83. Dordrecht: Springer, 2011. Gibson, J.J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2011. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harman, Gilbert. 1999. “Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99: 315–31. Howe, Irving and Lewis Alfred Coser. 1957. The American Communist Party: A Critical History, 1919–1957. Boston: Beacon Press. Hume, David. 1978. A Treatise of Human Nature. 2nd ed. Edited by L.A. Selby- Bigge and Rev. P.H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Israel, Jonathan. 2000. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kahneman, Daniel. 2003. “Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics.” The American Economic Review 93: 1449–75. Kant, Immanuel. 1965. “Preface to the Second Edition.” In Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by N. K. Smith. New York: Macmillan. Leibniz, G. W. 1989. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays. Translated by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Lucretius, Titus Carus. 1994. On the Nature of Things. Translated by Martin Ferguson Smith. Volume 1. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Machery, Edouard. 2010. “The Bleak Implications of Moral Psychology.” Neuroethics 3: 223–31. Mandler, George. 2007. A History of Modern Experimental Psychology: From James and Wundt to Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mar, Raymond A. and Keith Oatley. 2008. “The Function of Fiction Is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 3: 173–92. McGinn, Colin. 1999. TheMysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World. New York: Basic Books. Noë, Alva. 2015. Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. New York: Hill & Wang. Nussbaum, Martha. 1985. “‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Moral Attention and the Moral Task of Literature.” The Journal of Philosophy 82: 516–29. Plato. Phaedo. in Complete Works, tr. and ed. J. M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997, p. 85. Ramachandran, V. S. and William Hirstein. 1997. “Three Laws of Qualia: What Neurology Tells Us about the Biological Functions of Consciousness, Qualia and the Self.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 4: 429–58. Schechtman, Marya. 2014. Staying Alive: Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 130 Wilson Scholl, Brian J. 2005. “Innateness and (Bayesian)Visual Perception: Reconciling Nativism and Development.” In The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents, edited by Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence, and Stephen Stich, 34–52. New York: Oxford University Press. Scruton, Roger. 2014. The Soul of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sen, Amartya. 1977. “Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 6: 317–44. Shuster, Stephen M. and Michael J. Wade. 2003. Mating Systems and Strategies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sorell, Tom. 1994. Scientism: Philosophy and the Infatuation with Science. London: Routledge. Strawson, Galen. 2006. “Realistic Monism—Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism.” Reprinted in Consciousness and Its Place in Nature, edited by Anthony Freeman. Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic. Strawson, Galen. 27 Feb 2015. “Stoppard’s Real Hard Problem.” TLS (5839). Tegmark, Max. 27 Feb 2014. “Consciousness as a State of Matter.” v2 https://arxiv. org/abs/1401.1219 arXiv:1401.1219 [quant-ph]. Thompson, Willie. 1992. The Good Old Cause: British Communism, 1920–1991. London: Pluto Press. Wilson, Catherine. 2006. “Commentary on Galen Strawson.” Consciousness and Its Place in Nature, edited by Anthony Freeman, 177–83. Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic. Wilson, Catherine. 2013. “Darwin and Nietzsche.” The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 44: 353–69. Zammito, J. Forthcoming. The Gestation of Biology in Germany in the Eighteenth Century: Philosophy and Physiology from Stahl to Schelling. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 6 Engendering New Materializations Feminism, Nature, and the Challenge to Disciplinary Proper Objects

Angela Willey University of Massachusetts, Amherst

So, nature is not a physical place to which one can go, nor a treasure to fence in or bank, nor an essence to be saved or violated. Nature is not hidden and so does not need to be unveiled. Nature is not a text to be read in the codes of mathematics and biomedicine. It is not the “other” who offers origin, replenishment, and service. Neither mother, nurse, nor slave, nature is not matrix, resource, or tool for the reproduction of man … Nature is a topic of public discourse on which much turns, even the earth. Donna Haraway1

Queering what counts as nature is my categorical imperative. Queering specific normalized categories is not for the easy frisson of transgres- sion, but for the hope for livable worlds. Donna Haraway2

Nature is indeed, as Haraway so eloquently reminds us, a topic of public dis- course on which much turns. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, disciplinarity no less than the earth itself, is being reshaped by discourses of nature. The materialities, processes, and entanglements to which we refer when we invoke “nature” are being interrogated and theorized with a vigor and interest attuned to the stakes Haraway asserts: the very hope for livable worlds. Attention to the material consequences of how we understand what nature is has highlighted the limitations of relegating materiality to scien- tific disciplinary ways of knowing, and representation to humanistic ones. Proliferating feminist theories of the Anthropocene, of embodiment oriented to the molecular, and of the co-evolution of species and environments more generally, have been particularly generative in the contemporary “queering” of nature in and beyond critical theory. To “queer,” as Haraway uses it here, is to make strange what has been taken for granted. To queer “specific normalized categories” is to unsettle the obviousness of those categories and their referents, to open up questions that their normalized status forecloses. These projects engaged in queering our understandings of nature and thus our approaches to it have often been grouped in anthologies, conferences, 132 Willey syllabi, and critical responses under the loose signifier of “new ­materialism.” That is, a materialism that operates from a queer sense that the materiality of “the stuff of the world” is not as fixed or self-evident as dominant mate- rialisms have tended to presume (Alaimo 2013). My purpose in this chapter is twofold: to point to conceptual and meth- odological resources offered by feminist new materialisms, on the one hand, and to address genealogical obstacles to fully appreciating the implications of new materialism’s challenge to disciplinary proper objects on the other. The most exciting resources those projects designated “new materialist” offer, I pose, are frames, concepts, and tools for thinking beyond the boundaries of established humanistic and scientific modalities about “life,” “bodies,” and ultimately “nature.” In other words, their most generative potentialities for transforming knowledge toward ends oriented to social justice lies in the experiments they are conducting in operationalizing the Harawayan concept of “natureculture.” Haraway offers the term “natureculture” to describe a world that exceeds the analytics of the nature/culture binary that relegates “natural” objects to the natural sciences and “cultural” ones to the humani- ties (Willey 2016, 555). If nature and culture are not separate domains, but rather entangled processes of knowing and becoming, we (researchers), as Karen Barad’s work has been instrumental in demonstrating, bear some responsibility not only for how we represent nature, but for what exists. Feminist new materialisms offer resources for thinking about the imbrica- tion of knowing and being, or, put a bit differently, the importance of what we say about our worlds to processes of materialization. To endeavor to understand that relation is an ethical project, one with radical potential for bringing a new sort of accountability to our knowledge projects. What makes these contributions difficult to see, let alone engage on their own terms, is the paradoxically persistent instantiation of disciplinar- ity in new materialist storytelling. Characterizations of both “science” and “feminism”/“humanities” within stories about what new materialism is and why it is important seem to ignore histories of feminist thinking about both science and nature. In particular, I am concerned with how understandings of science underlying and wrought by the material turn in the humanities in general, and feminist theory in particular, undermine the methodological innovations of new materialist projects. I seek to offer a genealogy of new materialism not as a new sort of humanistic approach to science, but as part of a history of feminist theorizing about nature and culture. If new materi- alist storytelling were more attentive to the insights of science studies and situated within a longer genealogy of feminist theorizing about “nature,” it might be understood more usefully as a platform for the development of radically interdisciplinary methodologies. Reframed thus, through a femi- nist genealogy, debates surrounding new materialism might be productively re-focused on the relative usefulness of its innovations, rather than simply on its storytelling practices. I begin by introducing debates around new materialist storytelling in the first section “Narrating New Materialism.” I go on to examine and critique Engendering New Materializations 133 progress narratives around both science and the humanities within new materialist storytelling in the section entitled “A Tale of Two Paradigm Shifts: Or, the Romance of Anti-Essentialist Science and Science-Friendly Feminism.” These progress narratives leave science intact as a unitary pro- ject in ways that render illegible the innovative potential of new materialist approaches to science’s proper objects. In the third section, “The Gender of Nature: Feminists Theorize the Ostensibly Pre-Cultural,” I offer a genealogy of new materialism within feminist theoretical engagements with “nature.” This genealogy opens up space for reading new materialist feminism as a site for theorizing nature, rather than “engaging science.” The seemingly subtle epistemic shift wrought by this re-framing of the project of new materialism enables the work of my fourth section, “Materialist Methodologies.” In this section I highlight several resources for “naturecultural” research developed in new materialist feminist scholarship, including perspectival experiments, new archives of matter, and concepts for making processes of materializa- tion intelligible.

Narrating New Materialism In recent years, the story goes, a “new materialism” has emerged, one that recognizes nature as vital and complex (Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Barad 2007; Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost 2011; Hird 2004). Feminist theory has been a highly visible force in this reclaiming of matter. Even so, new materi- alism is often staged as an intervention in feminism, rather than as part of a long feminist tradition of theorizing embodiment, the relationship between nature and culture, and/or the possibility of feminist science (Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Coole and Frost 2011; Grosz 2004; Kirby 2008; Wilson 2004). Sara Ahmed has called this staging of new materialism as an inter- vention into feminist and humanistic approaches that have supposedly here- tofore neglected “the body” of new materialism’s “founding gestures.” Her highly influential intervention “Open Forum Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the ‘New Materialism’” (2008) launched a lively debate on the parameters and character of the field. The gesture that constituted its intelligibility as a field, Ahmed argued, was the erasure of a long history of feminist biologists’ and health activists’ engagements with scientific knowledge about the body. Herein, she takes up the new materialist critique of feminism as historically and habitually hostile to science and seeks to redress it. But the new in new materialism is not only a new feminist attitude toward science (Wilson 2004), but also a presumably new science. As Noela Davis (2009) countered in her response to Ahmed’s critique of the new materialism, the very examples Ahmed cites of science-friendly feminism are in fact examples of the importing of an old materialism, a stable albeit misrepresented body, into feminist projects. These serve as examples of what Myra Hird, drawing on Adrian Mackenzie and Andrew Murphie’s designations, has called “extraction.” Extraction is when feminists use scientific concepts or information in our (presumably 134 Willey non-scientific) research. It distinguishes itself from feminist critique of science, but also from engagement with matter, the purview of new materialism. The critique of “feminist antibiologism,” according to Davis, must be understood then to name not just feminism’s preoccupation with critique, but also its long-standing failure to interrogate the very nature of nature. It is to these enmeshed narratives of feminist and scientific progress that I turn my attention in the next section. To frame my critique of these new materialist stories as progress narratives, I draw on Clare Hemmings’ (2010) work on trends in storytelling about feminism’s recent past. She identifies tropes of “progress,” “loss,” and “return,” each serving to contain com- plexity by temporalizing political theoretical debate within a generational schema. She characterizes new materialism as a classic return narrative, one that seeks to recoup a lost past: “As with return narratives that prioritize social materiality, biomaterialist approaches insist that matter has been actively sidelined as a result of recent cultural theoretical preoccupations and that it is this that needs reintegrating into feminist theory in order to move forward” (Hemmings 2010, 106). Nikki Sullivan (2012) tracks this very trope in her analysis of new materialist discourses in animal studies: “[m]uch recent work that identifies with what it refers to as ‘new material- ism’ begins from the premise that over the last couple of decades feminism and/or social constructionism has focused on ‘culture,’ ‘discourse,’ ‘lan- guage,’ ‘the semiotic’ and so on, to the detriment of ‘matter’ (whatever that might mean)” (300). According to Hemmings (2010), return narratives tend to be light on citation, in part because they unite well-rehearsed oppositional narratives of progress and loss (112). A story of feminist theory’s increas- ing political sophistication can be made commensurate with a story of the good old days before everything was “reduced to text” by a new materialist return narrative that gives us back the body, in a new anti-essentialist form. Sari Irni (2013) extends Hemmings’ analysis of new materialist return nar- ratives in an attentive reading of the conflation of materialism and the natu- ral sciences in the operation of loss and return narratives in new materialist storytelling (351).3 Like Irni, I think this conflation is a problematic one for new materialisms and that challenging it opens doors for new visions of its collective project. By turning my attention to the scientific progress narratives that I argue enable this slippage, I disrupt temporal narratives of new materialism as an approach to science in order to make way for new genealogies that render the richly proliferating methodological provocations of feminist materialisms more useful within and beyond feminist theory.4

A Tale of Two Paradigm Shifts: Or, the Romance of Anti-Essentialist Science and Science-Friendly Feminism Positioned both against an imagined “old materialism” and against an “anti- materialist” humanities, the “new” in new materialism holds out the prom- ise not only of “new” epistemological approaches to “nature,” but indeed of Engendering New Materializations 135 new ontologies: new becomings, new worlds. This ­dual-disidentification in the progress narrative of new materialism hinges on the positing of two tem- poral shifts, one in the sciences and one in the humanities/feminism. First, new materialism is articulated as distinct from an “essentialist” or “deter- minist” old materialism. I will refer to this scientific progress narrative as anti-essentialist science. In turn, new materialism distinguishes itself from the old feminism/humanities by embodying a “new” disposition toward sci- ence, one I will refer to as “science friendly.” This science-friendly disposi- tion entails acknowledging our supposedly overblown and ultimately dated anxieties about the “threat” of science, given the revelation that science is not necessarily determinist, and that its proper objects are neither static nor contained entities.5 New materialisms are new, according to Myra Hird’s (2004) seminal review of the field, because they exceed the “critical” and “extractive” approaches of earlier feminist attention to science by “engaging” in/with it: “engagement attempts dialogue, conversation, and collaboration with science” (331). In her formulation, feminism is imagined to have matured from an automatically critical disposition toward the natural sciences, to a certain comfort level with borrowing from it, and finally, to full-blown engagement. Set apart from feminist critiques and uses of scientific stories, new materialist engagements here wrest “science” from scholarship on sci- ence. What does it really mean to engage science? What is science anyway? Within philosophy, history, and feminist theory, the meanings of scientific practices and knowledges have been broadly researched, richly theorized, and hotly debated. In the celebratory progress narrative of new materialist engagements, science remains a startlingly undertheorized object. The idea of an anti-essentialist science in this progress narrative depends upon implicit and explicit reference to scientific theories that contain some notion of nature’s plasticity, often in oblique references to epigenetics. The growing popularity of scientific stories that challenge the fixity of matter cannot be denied. Increasingly we hear about how our carbon footprints changed the weather, the planet, and how the air and water and soil, in turn, are making us sick. We also hear about how presumably social experiences of trauma alter our DNA, and how that genetic imprinting in turn medi- ates our behaviors. Within the progress narrative of new materialism, it is an old tired caricature of science—its deterministic face—that our critiques railed against (see for example Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Grosz 2011a; Hird 2004). That science was rightly critiqued, the story goes, for its essen- tializing claims about race, gender, and sexuality, and for its deterministic narratives about the relationship between difference and the distribution of power in society. The new science, that begs a new feminist disposition, is a science not ­hell-bent on imperial domination of the world through exhaustive mapping of its constitutive parts, but rather a science that acknowledges the co-­evolution of the “natural” and the “cultural,” the “human” and “non-human,” the 136 Willey “living” and “non-living.” A science beyond epistemological reproach, because it has, in theory, ceded ambitions to harness the essence of nature and understand the social world in terms of said essence to a naïve scientific past. It would seem that new materialism marks the birth of a new world indeed, one in which epistemological authority is diffuse, dispersed across disciplinary and extra-disciplinary ways of knowing. It would seem then that we are post-science-studies. And yet, the science of new materialist pro- gress narratives rings familiar. Herein lies a genealogical problem. The sci- ence-friendly feminism narrative elides a long history of thinking about how to do feminist and otherwise radical science. And the anti-essentialist science narrative writes out of the story a long history of anti-essentialist and non- deterministic sciences. The specificity of science—the nature of its particular sets of expertise as well as its privileged status—needs to be theorized vis à vis the ambitions of a “new materialism.” I am compelled by the draw to insist, still, upon the situated-ness of all knowledge (Haraway 1988) and the trap of the good (objective)/bad (biased) science distinction (Longino 1990). These staple insights of science studies, while not wholly absent from new materialist storytelling, have yet to be carefully considered with reference to the natural science celebrated in new materialist progress narratives. History is perhaps the best antidote to conceits of novelty. This is not the first time that dominant science narratives have undergone such a radical paradigm shift. One instructive example is scientific racism. Science studies debates on how to understand and narrate that history have much to offer new materialism. The dominant historical narrative surrounding racism in the biosciences is that it thrived largely unchecked until World War II, after which the project of scientific racism (the biologization of racial hierarchies) was formally closed (see Nancy Stepan’s 1983 account of this shift). In 1950 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) issued a Statement on Race that declared race a social and historical category. So the story goes that in this moment, the biological fiction of racial hierarchy was scientifically acknowledged, and science thus redeemed. An instructive skepticism regarding such scientific progress narratives about race is worth re-visiting to think about narratives of a non-deter- minative shift in general. Evelyn Hammonds (1997) and Jennifer Reardon (2004) both argue for alternative readings of the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race. They provide more skeptical readings of the symbolism and con- tent of the document and, in Reardon’s case, of the moment/context out of which it emerged. Rather than taking such declarations as truths that represent the freeing of science from racial ideology, Reardon proposes a reading of these scientific “advances” as Foucauldian “statements” that only make sense or gain support (are only intelligible, can only be uttered) if they function within the moral, political, economic, and epistemological frames of the dominant society. In this light she argues that far from signal- ing the surrender of the category of race to social scientists, the document represents a consolidation of the authority of scientists as those uniquely Engendering New Materializations 137 qualified to define race and racial difference. By challenging the racial mean- ings attributed to the visible body, the statement served to make race the providence of geneticists. So when more recent “statements” about the importance of race in scientific research emerge, she argues, we should read those as consistent with the supposed turn from racial determinism, not as a mysterious backlash indicating cases of “bad” science. Hammonds argues that the turn away from gross morphology in science said to characterize this shift never actually took place, that the idea of race both in science and in society is still very much visual and embedded in the idea of morpho- logical differences between “pure” racial types.6 Jennifer Hamilton’s (2014) new work on genomic indigeneity grapples with obstacles to anti-racism generated by these progress narratives that persistently locate hope for a post-racial society in scientific advancements. These critical readings suggest two sets of science studies questions for new materialist storytelling. First, what does the progress narrative of a new non-determinist science do for science? And second, in what ways is this narrative disingenuous? In other words, on the one hand, why does non- determinism ring true and how does the scientific appropriation of contin- gency, perhaps paradoxically, serve to consolidate epistemic authority? And on the other, in what ways is determinist science (1) still the rule of the day and (2) bolstered by narratives of contingency? I endeavor to open a con- versation on these two sets of questions by briefly historicizing bioscientific non-determinism and problematizing its unequivocal celebration. Indeed, alongside determinist theories about difference, the nineteenth- century biosciences offered paradigms for thinking about the relative plas- ticity of the differences it catalogued and measured. Despite the mostly mainstream critiques of the history of scientific racism (see for example Gould 1996), the biosciences did not in fact operate for over a century in strict service to justifying white male property rights with arguments about natural hierarchies (Rusert 2012). Nor has feminist critique of science been confined to these deterministic narratives (Bland and Doan 1999). Scientific evidence concerning the contingency of difference has served arguments for both the abolition of slavery and colonial occupation. Likewise sexual scientific arguments concerning acquired (versus congenital) inversion long informed paradigms of treatment for queer people. The tension between determinism and plasticity has always been a pro- ductive and slippery one. Biologically determinist narratives about racial- ized and gendered intelligence have drawn on all manner of evidence, from skull size to IQ testing, to prove the superior capacities of white men. At the same time, those stories were caught up with questions about what bodily practices and cultural contexts might produce and/or alter those innate dif- ferences. The modern biosciences have always concerned themselves with questions about the social (see Subramaniam 2014). As such, they have asked such questions as, for example: If women studied certain subjects, would their brains become larger? And would this then have the biological 138 Willey effect of hindering their chances of reproductive success? Was slavery cause or effect of perceived biological racial inequality? If black family structures looked more like the privatized white middle class ideal of breadwinner father and nurturing mother, would racial disparities in IQ scoring disap- pear? Could systems of colonial rule have a civilizing influence on suppos- edly less-evolved colonized populations? Could the right therapies produce heterosexual desire in queer subjects? Could some types of homosexual- ity be prevented through more rigid cultural policing of gender roles? Both determinism and contingency have been mobilized both to naturalize the status quo and to challenge it on its own terms. Arguments for the possi- bility of biological plasticity have been used to advocate progressive social change and violent cultural and psychological interventions. Proclamations on the nature of nature have remarkable political flexibility. Determinism and contingency are not in and of themselves political ori- entations. As Victoria Pitts-Taylor (2010) notes in her critique of the emer- gence of a neuronal self, “a critical framework for thinking about plasticity must include an acknowledgement of contemporary biopolitical economy” (639). Scholars across disciplines have invested enormous hope in the prom- ise of plasticity, Pitts-Taylor argues:

For a number of scholars in a range of fields, plasticity offers the pos- sibility of taking up the biological matter of the body while defying biological determinism … For postmodernists, poststructuralists, and others interested not only in displacing the liberal subject but also in productive alternatives, plasticity seems to offer positive chaos, creativ- ity, and multisubjectivity. For those pursuing posthumanism at various levels, plasticity renders the world as an infinite source of “wideware” for the brain, and positions the individual brain as inherently connected to others—things, artifacts, other brains. (647)

She captures well the promises and hopes caught up in the new materialist romance with contingent ontologies. If what we are is not all we might yet be, the world seems full of possibility. Pitts-Taylor asks us to think hard about why—and why now—plasticity makes so much sense and seems so promising. Whatever resources lie in its newest theories and iterations, we just understand plasticity’s research leads to “another interpretation” of plasticity, as a rhetoric of neoliberalism, deeply implicated in the depo- liticization of biology. While plasticity is the celebrated evidence of anti- essentialist science, and this anti-essentialist science is at the heart of new materialist progress narratives, temporal narratives of progress (toward non-determinism), loss (away from the body/nature), and return (back to the body/nature) are not the only new materialist stories to tell. New mate- rialisms also seek to legitimate feminist/humanistic sites of knowledge pro- duction about science’s proper objects. A turn to feminist theory’s historic Engendering New Materializations 139 engagements with “nature” offers a new frame for reading the contributions of feminist materialism.

The Gender of Nature: Feminists Theorize the Ostensibly Pre-Cultural From de Beauvoir to Butler, and now in new materialisms, the nature/­culture opposition has served as a central analytic and problematic for feminist theory. Nature/culture paradigms are historically gendered, and feminist understandings of their opposition have varied across contexts and shifted over time. Through these shifts, a long-standing commitment to understand- ing the importance of the concepts to gendered power and to feminist think- ing unites them and links feminist new materialism to earlier projects of feminist theory. Further, understanding new materialist claims about nature as part of this genealogy helps make visible the gendered valences of differ- ent narratives of feminist materialism. Nature is often conflated with science in new materialist storytelling. Calls to re-engage nature, life, or “the body” “itself” are often couched in a critique of feminism’s failure heretofore to adequately engage scientific disciplinary epistemologies, methods, or data (see Irni 2013; Willey 2016). The persistent slippage between objects “themselves” and disciplinary ways of imagining and knowing them is a common rhetorical feature of the case for new materialism. Disciplinary ways of knowing, like discourses of nature and culture, are gendered. The “hard” sciences are masculine and the humanities and its attendant methodologies are gendered feminine.7 “Science” depends upon the myth of the disinterested, detached, and neu- tral knower who has no social investments: this ideal of objectivity depends upon a myth of universality that distributes epistemic authority dispropor- tionately to perspectives invested in defending rather than challenging the status quo. Hence science, in its embodiment of this very particular ideal, can be imagined as apolitical and is thus coded as white and masculine. The humanities and “softer” sciences on the other hand are seen as politically invested, not neutral, and therefore racialized and feminized. When nature “itself” is conflated with scientific disciplinary approaches to it, it shifts from being coded (and devalued) as feminine to being coded and revalued as masculine. This gendered shift offers feminist theory a kind of credibility within mainstream political theory that its earlier reclamations of nature lacked. Understood as part of a feminist genealogy, new materialist recon- figurations of nature render that conflation problematically reductive and open space for new articulations of the project, articulations that render the ethical stakes of naturecultural frames transparent. The nature/culture distinction has been read historically as fundamen- tally hierarchical and highly gendered. Nature is associated with women and culture with men. This reading has been deployed by feminists in arguments for the need to revalue both the feminine (e.g., Carol Gilligan) and nature 140 Willey (e.g., Susan Griffin) and conversely for the importance of women’s place in culture. The nature/culture binary has also underpinned one of the most generative and contested concepts in contemporary feminist theory: the sex/ gender distinction. The distinction between sex and gender rests on a conceptual separa- tion of biological sex (female, male) and social gender (woman, man). The distinction has myriad articulations and attempts to theorize the relation- ship between the two categories have often been only implicitly a part of its deployment. The distinction is often made in order to set aside sex (nature) and focus on gender (culture). By and large the distinction can be (at least frequently is) said to rest on the simultaneous acceptance of sex as “true” or “real” and a conviction that it is largely irrelevant to feminism except as the grounds on which the imposition of gender is built and justified. The separation of nature/sex from gender/culture has served as an explanatory framework that undermines attempts to explain gender asymmetry or ineq- uity in men’s and women’s positions in the world, in politics, in the work force, in the family, etc., and sometimes gender identity, in terms of innate differences.8 Biology, the argument goes, is not destiny. Simone de Beauvoir is consistently credited with (or accused of) first applying the division of nature and culture to sexed bodies. Although more nuanced readings attentive to the complexities of her deployment of “sex” at different points in the text and to the ambiguities of the translation exist,9 many attempts to articulate theories of gender—and all of those I address here—rely on an appropriation of The Second Sex as the opening of a con- versation about how sex (nature) became gender (culture). Most begin here to extrapolate the importance of gender/culture. Butler, on the other hand, begins here to refute the adoption of the nature/culture binary as a formula- tion in feminist theory. In her introduction to The Second Sex, de Beauvoir (1972) remarks that “we are exhorted to be women, to remain women, become women. It would appear, then, that every female human being is not a woman” (xix). She reports that the characteristics ascribed to “the woman, negro, or Jew” are socially contingent. Sex, on the other hand, is in these readings of de Beauvoir “a biological fact, not an event in human his- tory” (xxv). This careful distinction between “naturally” sexed bodies and socially constructed masculine and feminine characteristics was an impor- tant one, that made way for myriad analyses of how gendered power is produced and reproduced in social institutions and in daily life. How those processes in turn impacted bodies would later emerge as another central concern within feminist science studies. In The Politics of Women’s Biology (1990), for example, Ruth Hubbard passionately described how gendered social rules surrounding dress, eating, and play for children become embod- ied biologically. In a classic and highly influential essay on the gender of nature, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” Sherry Ortner (1972) relies heavily upon de Beauvoir’s lengthy discussion of women’s physiology to explain how it Engendering New Materializations 141 is that women came to be associated with nature. She attempts to begin to explain the twofold problem of the apparent universality of women’s status as subordinate to men and of the substantial variation in the treatment of, and power accorded to, women from culture to culture and in different his- torical periods. Even as she rejects the argument of the biological inferiority of women as the basis for their universal subordination, Ortner is careful to clarify that she is not denying the relevance of biology or that male and female bodies are different. It is only within the context of culturally con- tingent value systems that we could, however, read the significance of that difference as hierarchical. So if biology cannot explain the lower status of women, the argument went, we have to look to other universals. The thing, Ortner posits, that every culture devalues, albeit to different degrees, and which every culture has associated with women, is nature. Culture (all cultures), she argues, see themselves as both distinct from and superior to nature. According to Ortner, woman (conflated here with female- bodiedness) is seen as at least closer to nature, if not equal to it, in every cul- ture in at least one of three ways. First, because of her “natural reproductive functions,” she is more closely associated with nature. Man’s role in repro- duction leaves him freer to pursue the activities of culture. Second, the social roles linked to reproduction, mostly due to breastfeeding, position women as caregivers and the association of women with children, despite their role in acculturating and socializing them, causes them to be seen as closer to nature. Finally, she draws on Nancy Chodorow to argue, women develop a specifically feminine psyche, a way of relating that is more concrete and less abstract, more embodied and less “transcendent” as it were. While women’s psychic difference from men was not innate for Ortner, it was nonetheless “true,” rather than a mere stereotype. The goal for Ortner was not, as it has been for some, the re-valuation of the natural/feminine, but rather the pur- suit of a world in which women participate more fully in “culture” and are thus aligned with the positive valuations with which it is associated. The very formulation of a (female) body, which is (mis)interpreted as the sole force limiting the capacity of roughly half of the world to participate fully in the cultures of which they are a part relies itself on a nature/culture distinction that subordinates nature in terms of its explanatory import. In this formulation, on which Ortner’s analysis and much thinking built upon it rely, nature is seen as real, but acted upon, indeed regulated, in ways that render the specific character of its “realness” unimportant, outside the scope of critical inquiry. This insight is foundational to projects of feminist mate- rialism that seek to trouble both the gendered valuation of knowledge and the lack of critical attention to the discourse of nature. Perhaps the definitive articulation of the sex/gender distinction, and thus the status of nature and culture in feminist theory for decades, is Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women” (1975). Here she set out to answer thequestion ­ of how one “becomes a woman” or rather how a “female” (benign anatomic variation) becomes an “oppressed woman” in her famous ­articulation of the 142 Willey separation of and relation between sex and gender: “a ‘sex/gender system’ is the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological ­sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied” (159). Transformation here refers to the idea of female- ness as “raw material” out of which (alternately) “women,” “oppressed women,” and “domesticated women” are “produced.” This image illus- trates precisely the process by which, according to Ortner, nature in its sub- ordination is always and everywhere (separate from and) acted upon by culture. It is changed into something useful, regulated and controlled so that it does not serve as an obstacle to progress, so that its powers do not get out of hand. This dichotomous pairing and the relation of domination by which it is characterized has been deployed both in accounts that seek to displace the significance of the natural (or the association of the feminine with it) and in those that seek to redeploy the metaphor in order to revalue both nature and the feminine. Rubin falls into the former category as she tries to imagine a world with- out gender, where the historically contingent kinship systems and socializa- tion/psychic reproduction of masculine and feminine subjects to meet its demands were displaced. In this world, the “raw material” would have no social significance. She draws on Marx, Engels, Levi-Strauss, and Freudian psychoanalysis in her attempt to explain the manipulation of nature (sex) into the cultural reality of gender. Her aim, like Ortner’s (and Catherine MacKinnon’s), is to provide a comprehensive (totalizing) account of the oppression of women, a theory with “the explanatory power of the Marxist theory of class oppression.” What Marx refers to as the “historical and moral element” that determines the value of labor power is precisely what he fails to account for in his assumptions about gender. That emphasis on context, on historical and cultural contingency, in terms of masculinity and femininity, their existence and meanings, is precisely what Rubin wants to address. This is, she argues, what Engels tried and failed to do in The Origin of the Family. She takes from Engels the idea that transforming the natural into products of human consumption is not reducible to “economy,” but is also dependent upon the reproduction of the family. The idea of a “sex/ gender” system separates the need and capacity for reproduction from the ways in which it is organized in specific contexts. In so doing, it calls into question the inevitability of gender based on this need, and thus a presumed causal relation between culture and nature. Rubin turns to kinship as a concrete example of sex/gender systems— systems that rely on and reproduce and naturalize specific forms of socially organized sexuality. Levi-Strauss explicitly conceives of kinship as some- thing imposed on nature (biological procreation) by culture, rather than as an inevitable manifestation of that nature. Because he places the exchange of women by men at the center of his analysis of kinship systems, argu- ing that the sheer variation of sexual divisions means that they must serve some social function, because they cannot be biologically determined, Rubin Engendering New Materializations 143 reads The Elementary Structures of Kinship as an unintentional critique of the naturalization of sex oppression. The gender division of labor can thus be read as a taboo on the sameness of men and women,10 “exacerbating” biological difference and thereby creating gender. In several places in “The Traffic in Women,” Rubin refers to gender (culture) as the “exacerbation” or “exaggeration” of sex difference (nature). The naturalized division of labor also necessitates heterosexual marriage. Without a man and a woman, a/the “family” could not function. “Obligatory heterosexuality” is for Rubin an important piece of the production (and maintenance) of gender (and vice versa), along with the incest taboo (which necessitates the forma- tion of new families). She turns to psychoanalysis (rather than biology) to explain how children become gendered, able to meet these demands. The theory of gender acquisition, which has been rightly critiqued as the normal- izing transformation of contingent moral law into scientific fact, could, she contends, have been used to critique sex roles. She retells the story of normal development as the cultural “deformation” of inherently benign/meaning- less natural sex/ual differences into heterosexual masculinity and feminin- ity. Sexual anatomy does not, without cultural intervention, she concludes, produce gender and/or heterosexuality. Catherine MacKinnon (1989) developed another highly influential approach to de-naturalizing women’s oppression by wresting anatomy and physiology from their supposedly natural expression in a gendered social world. Hers became a highly influential theory of gender to parallel Marxism as a theory of class.11 Sexuality is for MacKinnon, like Rubin, essential to the production of gender. But for MacKinnon, the existence of gender can be explained solely by sexuality. Sexuality is the domain of the constitution of gender. Femaleness (sex) is (made into) femininity in (and by) culture. Every aspect of femininity, she argues, is sexual: vulnerability, passivity, softness, incompetence, domesticity, infantilization, fixation on dismem- bered body parts, vapidity, narcissism, and masochism are all inherently sexual designations (MacKinnon 1989, 110). Gender socialization is the process by which females come to recognize themselves as objects for sexual use by men; to be a woman is not to be female, but to be sexually available on male terms. Pornography, harassment, rape, incest, and prostitution, all of which MacKinnon argues objectify women, are the primary mechanisms by which this socialization occurs. “Objectivity” and “objectification” are here closely related. What is “objectively” known is what can be observed, what exists is produced through objectification, that objectification is thus naturalized and reproduced: male power (systematic and hegemonic, not necessarily belonging to male bodies) produces women and confirms what they are in the same move. In other words, for MacKinnon, the representation of gender (women) is inseparable from its production: “male power” produces the world. Feminism is in her view the fight for consciousness, the struggle to explain this reality (the one in which women are oppressed by men, exist for men, 144 Willey embody male desire in all of their attributes) as the success of “male suprem- acy,” rather than as natural and inevitable. The fact that this gendered reality emerges out of very particular social, historical, and economic cir- cumstances does not for MacKinnon expose fissures or hold out the possi- bility of different sexual existences or genders. As Wendy Brown has pointed out, MacKinnon generalizes a “pornographic heterosexual sexual” (Brown 1995, 85) rationality as the singular force constituting gender transcultur- ally and throughout history. The consequences for feminist theory are a trade from biological to cultural determinism. And it is the stuck place this type of cultural determinism leaves us that prods collective feminist think- ing to questions of contingency: to ask what happens when variables shift, to recognize diversity, and to be alert to real and imagined possibilities for being otherwise. Here I aim to narrate feminist political investments in possibility not moored by biological or social determinism in the interest of distinguishing between two contingency discourses that have become conflated in new materialism in troubling ways. One contingency discourse is that offered as a political critique of the idea that what is, is all that could be. According to this feminist perspective, our ideas about what bodily differences are salient and what aspects of human experiences matter, our systems of subjectiv- ity, social belonging, and political organization, and our current econo- mies of value and attention are not inevitable and could yet be otherwise. The second contingency discourse operates as a neo-positivist corrective to (already highly contingent) assumptions about the static nature of matter. The former wants to hold open the possibility of new material-discursive realities. The latter sees contingency as a property of matter and invests that property “itself” with a necessarily radical set of political and ethical impli- cations. The latter’s investments in matter without the former’s critique of naturalized forms is dangerous, because, as we have seen, the plasticity of seemingly fixed materiality lends itself to a multiplicity of political visions of other worlds, many undesirable. The latter can however be put to use in the service of the former to inform an onto-epistemological ethics of knowledge production. New materialists like Noela Davis argue precisely that nature has been left un(der)theorized in feminist thought, but it is Butler who inaugurated this shift in feminist theory to a critical rejection of nature/culture dualism. Butler’s challenge to the nature/culture distinction disrupted the logic of the sex/gender distinction. Reformulating Ortner’s foundational question, Butler argued that gender is not to culture as sex is to nature. This implicit reproduction of Cartesian mind/body dualism constrains language and thereby thought about what gender (and sex) might “be” and how they might come about and be reproduced. If, given the logic of the sex/gender distinction, gender is not determined or limited by sex, the persistently binary system of gender in which we finds ourselves (re)produced as mas- culine and feminine subjects is suspect. We cannot leave “sex” (“nature”) Engendering New Materializations 145 uninterrogated. If we contest the fixity and ahistorical status of sex (and of both/either sex/es), suggesting that sex itself is a contingent way of coding bodies, sex is revealed as, in her now famous articulation, “always already gender.” Rather than the (cultural) manipulation of a primary, biological (natural) difference into the means to oppress women, gender becomes the process by which bodies are legible as sexed in the first place. There is no body not yet interpreted, outside of discourse as it were. It is an epistemological commitment to gender that has produced sex as “natural.” The question is no longer how sex is made gender, but rather becomes one of re-imaging gender to account for the production of a pre-discursive sexed body. In other words, how did certain aspects of anatomy and physiology over others come to take on explanatory import as definitive of salient population-level distinctions among human types (male and female)? In this move against the sex/gender distinction, “nature” becomes an object of feminist inquiry, no longer the discrete object of scientific knowing, but as Haraway says, an object of public discourse. The idea that sex is the “raw material” of gender—that sex is before “the law” (culture)—is, according to Butler (2006), “a discursive forma- tion that acts as a naturalized foundation for the nature/culture distinction and [importantly] the strategies of domination that distinction supports” (47–48). Any attempt to theorize women’s (or lesbians’) emancipation from oppression based on recourse to a time/space/state outside or “before” the culture that constitutes “us” as oppressed is doomed to reproduce the terms of our oppression. The imaginary before is produced within/by the same linguistic economy. It became clear that we need to rethink “nature.” Or in Lynda Birke’s (2000) formulation: we (feminists) can’t afford to cede “biol- ogy” to the natural sciences. Butler begins by looking at how an a priori nature is invoked in femi- nist theories of gender. In so doing, she offers a Foucauldian re-writing of Rubin’s seminal appropriation of psychoanalytic theory as an account of the construction of gender. Here she subjects the incest taboo to critique of the repression hypothesis. If, as Rubin argues, the incest taboo produces both binary gender and heterosexuality, it must also produce homosexual- ity. Rubin’s sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, reliance on the idealized image of the polymorphous perversity of early childhood (nature), before the law (culture) makes of us successful or failed heterosexual men and women, is the point with which Butler takes issue. Recourse to this before is, again, also an effect of the law (culture). The law creates that which requires repression, its status as prediscursive, and the normalizing regimes that apparently repress it. So if nature was once the site of justifications for women’s oppression, feminists sought to render it a banal canvas, in response to which Butlerian frames insisted that the romantic innocence of the blank slate is no more than the specter of a misogynist nature, the truth in which our salvation lies. 146 Willey In Barad’s (2003, 2007) reading of Butler, she contends that in Bodies That Matter Butler (1993) simply didn’t go far enough, and seeks to extend Butler’s theory of performativity to matter itself, in what she calls “posthu- man performativity.” Culture certainly makes “nature” legible and mean- ingful in ways well rehearsed in Butlerian frames. However, “culture”—our epistemological commitments, methodological approaches, and apparatuses of measurement—don’t just render “nature” in particular ways; they have material effects. We are responsible then not just for how we represent nature—as a static, non-dynamic slate for the imposition of gendered/cul- tural meaning—but also for what exists. The theoretical task, in Haraway’s (1994) words, “is to get at how worlds are made and unmade, in order to participate in the processes, in order to foster some forms of life and not oth- ers” (62). Grounded within this genealogy of feminist theory’s engagements with “nature,” new materialisms become a site for experimentation with the onto-epistemological facticity of material life. This raises new questions, not about matter, but about ethics: How does this accountability operate in both the ethics of research practise and daily life? How are knowing and being mutually imbricated? How can knowing otherwise change what is? Where nature and culture are imagined the appropriate disciplinary objects of the natural sciences and humanities respectively, the gendered devaluation of nature shifts. When we narrate the humanities and sciences as distinct pre-formed knowledge projects, we reinvigorate the nature/cul- ture binary through the romance of reproductive heteronormativity. And when we narrate a reconsideration of “nature” as a re/turn to “science,” feminized nature is not re-valued as a source of knowledge, so much as science’s mastery and authority to name it is reconsolidated. If we have come to an understanding of previously disciplinary phenomena as complex “intra-actions” and “the world” as an ongoing achievement of (inextricably) naturecultural becomings, we need new languages, concepts, and tools with which to study it. Beyond grand statements about “new materialism”—by both proponents and critics—recent materialist feminist scholarship offers up tools for imagining what naturecultural research could be.

Materialist Methodologies Within this feminist literature, modest strategies for new materialist research emerge as potential methodological innovations. Read as such a methodo- logical project, the rethinking of nature that new materialism insists upon might open rather than foreclose possibilities for knowing our worlds. In this section I examine feminist materialist methodologies that integrate the objects of humanistic and scientific approaches into new, fundamentally interdisciplinary research strategies. I focus on very specific contributions to research practice among scholars linked by shared conceptual debts to Barad and Haraway’s respective theories of the inseparability of being and knowing (quantum entanglement and naturecultures). Focusing on three Engendering New Materializations 147 strategies—strategic anthropomorphizing, creating a capacious archive of the study of matter, and developing conceptual models for the naturecul- tural study of science’s proper objects—I begin to map the contours of a story of new materialism as a methodological project that need not depend upon narratives of feminist or scientific progress. Strategic anthropomorphism (Bennett 2010), or “Thinking as the Stuff of the World” (Alaimo 2013), is a tool of feminist new materialisms that seeks to bring an ethos of accountability to knowledge-making through perspectival experimentation. Both Jane Bennett and Stacy Alaimo ask us to suspend those familiar political anxieties about this type of approach: Where does it leave us? From what does it distract our attentions? What could it even mean to think about the agency of things? Without doubt, these concerns are well grounded.12 Rhetorical strategies concerning the “agency” of matter revive and exacerbate long-standing feminist debates surrounding the limits of the concept of agency in general, as well as more specific concerns about the flattening that likens diverse scales and kinds of subjects and things. But in suspending these cri- tiques, if only fleetingly, we agree to participate in a thought experiment that makes tangible the importance of how we see to what we know. As a method for disrupting anthropocentric thinking, Bennett (2010) recommends that we practice anthropomorphizing (120). Paradoxically, imagining the desires and woes of non-human entities through human categories of concern may help us (human researchers) to imagine ways of seeing that destabilize the human exceptionalism that has characterized most of western thought and by which our thinking (including our conceptions of “matter”) has been disciplined. At the very least, this tool prods us to reflect on the specificity of our own subject positions and the nature of the partiality of knowledge claims that persistently privilege the interests of some humans over all else. A second methodological resource emerging from feminist new material- ist thought is experimentation with the boundaries of what I call archives of matter. That is to say, some feminist new materialist thinkers “take matter seriously” by substantively engaging knowledges not generated in acknowl- edged scientific ways. In so doing, they suggest mining a far more expansive archive than many materialists acknowledge. This type of methodology is both genealogical and practice-based. That is to say, some feminist material- ists have intentionally drawn from rich histories of theorizing embodiment and corporeality within traditions of critical thought to ground their mate- rialism. These gestures to non-scientific resources for theorizing “matter” destabilize disciplinarity by displacing nature as the proper object of sci- ence. Alaimo (2010) for example turns to Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals and to eco-feminist movements of the later twentieth century, while Mel Chen (2012) turns to disability studies, and Banu Subramaniam (2015) to fictional science. These challenges to the locus of materialist knowledge also have implications for the practice of science, raising fundamental questions about who gets to say what bodies are and decides what information about them is necessary, interesting, or useful. The centering of these questions has 148 Willey democratizing implications for acknowledging a world of sciences (Harding 2006) and revaluing ways of knowing that have been sidelined if not wholly supplanted by the increasing molecularization of body-knowledges (Roy and Subramaniam 2016) in what Pitts-Taylor has called a “neurosociety”— that is, a world where we rely increasingly on neuroscientific data to make sense of bodies and the societies of which they are a part. In addition to strategic anthropomorphism and a capacious archive for knowing nature, feminist new materialists have offered myriad strategies for operationalizing naturecultures, and thus accounting for the imbrication of its constitutive categories. Elizabeth Wilson for example develops the con- cept of the “psychosomatic” and Alaimo of the “transcorporeal.” Wilson reclaims “psychosomatic” from its use as a dismissive explanation of sup- posedly non-biological symptoms to refer to processes by which the psychic becomes embodied in the soma. Centering the “mechanism of conversion (of psyche to soma)” as a problem for feminism, Wilson (2004) offers us a new kind of research object, and a biology that necessitates interdisciplinary approaches (5). Understanding how we come to embody ideation has ethical implications—taken to its logical conclusion it demands a different sort of attentiveness to the “merely cultural.” Alaimo goes further with the con- cept of the trans-corporeal to describe our always more-than-human bod- ies. Transcorporeality names that dynamic co-constitution of once-discreet categories of person and place. Emerging from environmental justice and health movements, it allows us to see that “the environment” is not outside of our bodies, suggesting forms of accountability misconstrued as unrealistic within what Claire Brault (2015) refers to as a capitolocentric temporality. My own contribution to this conversation on how to capture the ­material-discursive nature of nature has been the development of a concept I call “biopossibility”—biopossibility builds on these models to offer a con- ceptual alternative to “biology” for inter-, trans-, and perhaps post-discipli- nary materialist research (Willey 2016). Working from an archive of matter that exceeds the disciplinary locus of biology, biopossibility names those realized and unrealized species- and context-specific capacities for embodi- ment of socially meaningful traits. I argue that to look at these capacities as “biopossibilities” is not only to acknowledge their materiality and its contingency, but also, importantly, to queer (or to acknowledge the con- tingency of) the categories themselves. The historical, cultural, economic, and political intelligibility of the “stuff” we seek to understand naturecul- turally must be seen as part of the apparatus of research from which the object itself cannot be separated (Barad 2007). Take human sexuality for example. If Wilson’s psychosomatic helps us understand the material-dis- cursive reality of sexuality as we know it, and Alaimo’s transcorporeality can illuminate desire’s inseparability from larger (and smaller!) contexts of more-than-human factors, biopossibility helps us see sexuality itself as a context-specific possibility. If sexuality is both real and embodied and context-sensitive in its materializations, other biopossibilities exist cotermi- nously. Biopossibility offers us resources for a grounded reconsideration of Engendering New Materializations 149 the categories that shape how we read and measure sexual variables (among other things) across science and non-science disciplines. In other words, whereas the study of biology tends toward ever more complex mapping of processes to better illuminate its objects, the study of its same objects as biopossibilities is oriented to the undoing of those objects. The naturecul- tural complexity of sexuality across different scales and evolutionary tempo- ralities might from the perspective of biology suggest a more comprehensive theory of desire.13 From the perspective of biopossibility, that complexity suggests the inadequacy of sexuality as an explanatory grid for the objects gathered under the moniker, thus holding open space for imagination in service to new knowledges and new materializations.

Re-Narrativizing the Project of New Materialisms In new materialist storytelling we have witnessed a slippage not only between materialism and science (Irni 2013; Sullivan 2012; Willey 2016), but also between claims about the nature of the project of new materialism. On the one hand, new materialism insists upon the inseparability of ontol- ogy and epistemology, being and knowing, nature and culture. On the other hand, new materialism insists on the agency of non-living, non-human, and/ or molecular matter. Despite their affinity with one another, these charac- terizations of the field do not comprise the same call to action in terms of rethinking our approaches to knowledge making. The former is a capacious call for creative and reflexive reimagining of the meaning of meaning mak- ing. In this call, we are asked to reconsider the stakes of knowledge politics to include the very materialization of bodies and worlds. In taking up this call, we must recognize the malleability of the conceptual boundaries that demarcate the proper objects of disciplinary inquiry. This project may or may not include considerations of “matter” per se. The latter formulation, where new materialism is about acknowledging the vitality, vibrancy, live- liness, or agency of “matter,” tends to leave matter intact as conceptual object, one that belongs to science. The “newness” in this formulation lies then not in a reconceptualization of the nature of nature, but rather in offer- ing a corrective to a presumably temporally and politically retrograde under- standing of its properties. Matter, in this latter formulation, is not static and inert (as we once thought, the story goes), but rather dynamic, a force in its own right. This insight, while sometimes celebrated for its ethical implica- tions regarding accountability to nature, is not in itself a politically inflected one. Without the first call, one that insists on the importance of context to the onto-epistemological facticity of matter, new materialism operates as a neo-positivist agenda that ultimately reconsolidates the authority to say what we are and might become in scientific disciplinary ways of know- ing. Conversely, framed as a corrective, new materialism’s most promis- ing ambition—the methodological refusal of disciplinary proper objects—is lost. And the stakes of this loss are high, as a critical materialism could be 150 Willey a site for reimaging what knowledges count and for proliferating narrative resources for knowing our worlds, and, in turn, making them anew.

Notes 1 Haraway 1992, 296. 2 Haraway 1994, 60. 3 See Papoulias and Callard (2010) for a similar critique on discourses surrounding biology in affect studies. 4 See also Dolphijin and van der Tuin’s work on what they call the “transversality” of new materialism (2010). 5 See, for example, Grosz 2011a and 2011b; Wilson 2004. 6 See Hammonds 1997; Hammonds and Herzig 2009; Koenig et al. 2008; Reardon 2004. 7 See Scott 2010. 8 See Rubin 2012 for a genealogy of the sex/gender distinction. 9 See for example Stella Sandford (1999), “Contingent Ontologies: Sex, Gender and ‘Woman’ in Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler.” In a play on Butler’s famous critique of de Beauvoir, she asks whether, with regard to the status of sex (gender all along), we might read de Beauvoir as “Butler all along.” 10 In relation to Irigaray’s critique of the logic of the same, “the old dream of sym- metry,” this might be read as the opposite, a taboo on difference. 11 See Wendy Brown (1995) for a thorough discussion of the choices that MacKinnon makes in trying to formulate this parallel, sometimes as compared to other (more compelling) feminist appropriations of Marx (79–84). 12 See Herzig 2004 for a thoroughgoing analysis of what she calls “vocabularies of motive.” 13 See, for example, van Anders’ (2015) sexual configurations theory.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2008. “Open Forum Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the ‘New Materialism.’” European Journal of Women’s Studies 15 (1): 23–39. Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Alaimo, Stacy. 2013. “Thinking as the Stuff of the World.” O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies 1: 13–20. Alaimo, Stacy and Susan J. Hekman. 2008. Material Feminisms. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Anders, Sari M. van. 2015. “Beyond Sexual Orientation: Integrating Gender/Sex and Diverse Sexualities via Sexual Configurations Theory.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 44 (5): 1177–213. Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801–31. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1972. The Second Sex. Translated by H.M. Parshley. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Engendering New Materializations 151 Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Birke, Lynda. 2000. Feminism and the Biological Body. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Bland, Lucy and Laura Doan, eds. 1999. Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brault, Claire. 2015. “Time to Leave Uchronia: Queer Eco-Temporalities for a Livable World.” PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 2006. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Chen, Mel. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Davis, Noela. 2009. “New Materialism and Feminism’s Anti-Biologism: A Response to Sara Ahmed.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 16 (1): 67–80. Gould, Stephen Jay. 1996. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2011a. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2011b. “Matter, Life, and Other Variations.” Philosophy Today 55 (2011): 17–27. Hamilton, Jennifer A. 15 Nov. 2014. “Reconstructing Indigenous Genomes: Ethical Exclusions in an Era of Genetic Indigeneity.” Paper presented at National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Hammonds, Evelynn M. 1997. “New Technologies of Race.” In Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life, edited by Melodie Calvert and Jennifer Terry, 107–22. London: Routledge. Hammonds, Evelynn M. and Rebecca M. Herzig. 2009. The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–99. Haraway, Donna. 1992. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, 295–337. New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 1994. “A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies.” Configurations 2 (1): 59–71. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Harding, Sandra. 2006. Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Hemmings, Clare. 2010. Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 152 Willey Herzig, Rebecca. 2004. “On Performance, Productivity, and Vocabularies of Motive in Recent Studies of Science.” Feminist Theory 5 (2): 127–47. Hird, Myra J. 2004. “Feminist Matters: New Materialist Considerations of Sexual Difference.” Feminist Theory 5 (2): 223–32. Hubbard, Ruth. 1990. The Politics of Women’s Biology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Irni, Sari. 2013. “The Politics of Materiality: Affective Encounters in a Transdisciplinary Debate.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 20 (4): 347–60. Kirby, Vicki. 2008. “Natural Covers(at)ions: Or, What if Culture Was Really Nature All Along?” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, 214–36. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Koenig, Barbara A., Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah S. Richardson. 2008. Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Longino, Helen E. 1990. Science as Social Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. MacKinnon, Catharine A. 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ortner, Sherry B. 1972. “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” Feminist Studies 1 (2): 5–31. Papoulias, Constantina and Felicity Callard. 2010. “Biology’s Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect.” Body & Society 16 (1): 29–56. Pitts-Taylor, Victoria. 2010. “The Plastic Brain: Neoliberalism and the Neuronal Self.” Health 14 (6): 635–52. Reardon, Jenny. 2004. “Decoding Race and Human Difference in a Genomic Age.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 15 (3): 38–65. Roy, Deboleena and Banu Subramaniam. 2016. “Matter in the Shadows: Feminist New Materialism and the Practices of Colonialism.” In Mattering: Feminism, Science and Materialism, edited by Victoria Pitts-Taylor, 23–57. New York: New York University Press. Rubin, David A. 2012. “‘An Unnamed Blank That Craved a Name’: A Genealogy of Intersex as Gender.” Signs 37 (4): 883–908. Rubin, Gayle. 1975. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press. Rusert, Britt. 2012. “The Science of Freedom: Counterarchives of Racial Science on the Antebellum Stage.” African American Review 45 (3): 291–308. Sandford, Stella. 1999. “Contingent ontologies: Sex, Gender and ‘Woman’ in Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler.” Radical Philosophy 97: 18–29. Scott, Joan Wallach. 2010. “Gender: Still a Useful Category of Analysis?” Diogenes 57 (1): 7–14. Stepan, Nancy. 1982. The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960. London: Macmillan. Subramaniam, Banu. 2014. Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Sullivan, Nikki. 2012. “The Somatechnics of Perception and the Matter of the Non/ human: A Critical Response to the New Materialism.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 19 (3): 299–313. Engendering New Materializations 153 Van der Tuin, Iris and Dolphijn, Rick. 2010. “The Transversality of New Materialism.” Women: A Cultural Review 21 (2): 153–71. Willey, Angela. 2016. “Biopossibility: A Queer Feminist Materialist Science Studies Manifesto, with Special Reference to the Question of Monogamous Behavior.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41 (3): 553–77. Wilson, Elizabeth A. 2004. Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 7 What Sort of Thing Is the Social? Or, Durkheim and Deleuze on Organization and Infrastructure

Ian Lowrie Rice University

I am an anthropologist. I try to make parsimonious, theoretically consistent sense of the world of social processes. My current work is on the role of the data sciences, particularly machine learning, in post-Soviet Russian technoc- racy. The fieldwork for this project has brought me into contact with folks who work on developing Russian natural language search algorithms, min- ing data to build profiles of Russian consumers, building neural networks to train computers to recognize postal addresses, and using expert-systems modeling to develop just-in-time logistics systems that reflect the realities of the Russian transport system. Given these encounters, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to describe social processes that cut across human– nonhuman boundaries: meaningful circuits of cognitive and cultural activ- ity that sweep through bodies, minds, computing systems, digitized data, trucks, and streets. In this chapter, I try to put forward a vision of soci- ety adequate to this project of description. This is a strongly realist vision, influenced by systems thinking and contemporary materialist and naturalist philosophy: namely, that society produces the ground against which things come into being, and forms the horizon of that being. In making my case, I draw heavily upon Deleuze and Guattari, although I ultimately reach conclusions that they themselves would likely find both politically and philosophically distasteful. Their understanding of the social relies heavily on the molecular sociology of Gabriel Tarde; rather delib- erately, I have chosen to read them instead with Tarde’s chief rival, the organicist Emile Durkheim. We might call such a project “speculative,” but I prefer to think of it as an exercise in abductive reasoning (Peirce 1906). That is to say, I take as given what I see as two of the critical discover- ies of twentieth-century social research: the Durkheimian realization that social phenomena have an objective existence; and Deleuze and Guattari’s recognition that the systematicity of these phenomena are best understood through a logic of tracing and coding. However, I also take as empirical fact that they are ordered by the historical, which is to say material, conditions of their development, which I understand to be the shared, authentic insight of the new and old materialisms alike. Working backward from these three tenets, I am here attempting to work out a theoretical framework What Sort of Thing Is the Social? 155 that would render them logically consistent and, indeed, would imply their empirical truth.

New Materialisms I’ve been drawn to the new materialisms primarily because they, more than most work in the social sciences, have been keen to pay attention to the “materiality” of even those things that we might not immediately recognize as material. However, I’d like to suggest, modestly, that this work perhaps hasn’t done the finest job of answering my titular question: what kind of a thing is the social? Many working in new materialism likely would say that this is a poorly formed question, not even properly intelligible within their materialist, often monist paradigms, committed in either case to exploding ready-made wholes and rejecting idealism at every turn. These thinkers have instead turned toward the investigation of concrete social processes, pro- ducing sophisticated insights into the interplay of material forces at work in all sorts of naturecultural matterings. Of those new materialists who do turn toward the investigation of something like the social, however, precisely none are interested in developing a comprehensive ontological explanation for something like “society.” Jane Bennett, for example, wants to defer much of the work of the social to smaller units of aggregation, which she calls “assemblages,” and is curiously silent about the question of the field in which these units may be acting. Her work devotes a great deal of careful atten- tion to charting the social lives of things, particularly infrastructural things— indeed, her concept of vibrant matter seems to have emerged in part through her work on the electrical grid (2005). However, despite her disciplinary location within political philosophy, even Bennett is largely uninterested in positive understandings of the social or collectivity. The nation may be the largest assemblage, perhaps, but it is one among many; there is most defi- nitely no “most complex whole” (Tylor 1920, 1) within which persons act. More speculative Object-Oriented Ontologies, for their part, have sug- gested that societies might be understood as objects much like any other. The most sophisticated sociological thinker of this cohort, to my mind, is Levi Bryant. Bryant (2014) has put forward a complex ontology based on the figure of the machine. His ontological analysis makes lively use of the interaction of the corporeal and incorporeal, rather than reducing every thing to only its material dimensions. Both an equation and a dog are, equally, machines, in that they are objects variously shaped by both nature and culture over their evolutionary trajectories, which have achieved a cer- tain degree of operational closure vis à vis their environments, and a certain degree of internal systematicity. Even a crystal is a machine, in his telling, in that it is capable of entering into a series of definite and limited relationships with the world outside of itself, of playing a meaningful role in a range of processes. These are “naturecultural” objects, never entirely natural or artifi- cial, but instead collaboratively “jerry-rigged by the anonymous MacGyvers 156 Lowrie of nature and culture” (80). Machines remain discrete from one another, but enter into relation in the form of assemblages and ecologies, ordered by the “gravitational” or affective force that they assert on one another. From Bryant’s perspective, however, what I am committed to calling “society” is nothing but an analytic misidentification of a great number of closely inter- related but ontologically distinct structures. This tendency toward nominal- ism and rejection of properly universal ontological speculation is typical of his thought more generally; indeed, he is as agnostic about what the fun- damental constituents of machines might be as about how to describe the spaces between and around them. However, he is quite willing to assert that this latter is most certainly not society: he is explicit that a given human col- lectivity is, at most, one concatenation of assemblages among many, able to couple with or affect other machines, but enjoying at best only quantitative pride of place among them. Again, as with Bennett, the relationship between these machines and assemblages is essentially understood as the result of an agonistic, ungoverned interaction of their individual outputs—what other thinkers variously gloss as will, force, or agency. While I find much of his analysis congenial, I find this inability or unwill- ingness to engage with the ontological ground against which machines and thought about machines has emerged unfortunate. He joins with the vital materialists in his refusal to think the social as something real, much less as a necessary field condition for something like human engagement in naturecultural matterings, in the construction of meaningful, produc- tive, and interconnected machines, to emerge. Instead, both view soci- ety as one object, assemblage, or emergent system among many others, with which it interacts in a loosely networked fashion. That is to say, it may be acknowledged that society has an impact upon the processual, but that impact is to be understood as essentially the result of an interplay of force and agency. While I am willing to adopt an analytic of immanence between quotidian things such as equations and dogs as adequate to the description of a great number of ontic interactions and processes, to my mind “flat ontology” is a bit of an oxymoron. It ultimately does little to tell us about what things are, where or how they exist, or why it is pos- sible to say anything meaningful about them at all. My argument is that this is in large part because many flat ontologists have neglected to think seriously about the relationship between human collectivity, the space of reasons, and becoming.

Culture Of course, others have been far more willing to think seriously about the interrelationship of collectivity, being, and meaning. One anthropological approach to this nexus has been culture theory. Building upon the work of thinkers like Victor Turner (1967), Clifford Geertz (1973), and Marshall Sahlins (1981), themselves drawing upon the work of Boasians such as What Sort of Thing Is the Social? 157 Kroeber (1917) and Benedict (1934), many anthropologists have theorized culture as a standing reserve of semiotic material, which socialization and quotidian practice turns into something like an inhabitable, coherent, and shared lifeworld for a more-or-less bounded group or community of humans. We humans find ourselves in culturally specific “webs of significance” that we ourselves have spun (Geertz 1973, 5), which in turn act as enabling con- straints on the range of possible actions and thoughts of a given collective. This interpretive or symbolic perspective on the life of groups has proved an extremely durable and flexible ground for inquiry into human lifeways; it is congenial to this project insofar as it has attempted to understand the cultural as the matrix of intelligibility and meaning within which all action is, from the get-go, encompassed, although it has rarely gone so far as to assert the ontological fundamentality of such matrices. Over the past forty years or so, however, culture theory has fallen somewhat out of favor. From the one side, it has been rightly critiqued by ecological and Marxist thinkers, who have argued that by abstracting meaning-making from the real productive activities and social organization of human beings, culture theorizing tends toward a politically conservative and empirically impoverished lack of attention to the actual material and political dynamics of human collectivities (e.g., Wolf 1999). Against those who would argue that “the imposition of meaning on life is the major end and primary condition of human existence” (Geertz 1973, 434), thinkers in this tradition are committed to a vision of being that focuses on agonistic struggle between classes or other groups within society, mediated through concrete material practices, which are only secondarily meaningful. From the other, culture as concept has been undermined by the post-structuralist recognition of the inability to specify the boundaries or substance of culture, except essentially by the fiat of the observer. In the wake of James Clifford and George Marcus’ Writing Culture (1986), much ink has been spilled in debates about whether it is epistemologically possible to determine where one meaning-making system ends and another begins, or, further, to locate the ontological ground of these meaning-making systems “out there” in the world rather than “in here” among the reifying texts of anthropological knowledge production. Ultimately, I think that both of these critiques are essentially right, and agree that “culture” isn’t really adequate to the description of either small- scale or complexly global human aggregates. Further, despite some recent, laudable attempts to rigorously specify the ontological status of culture, little has been done from within this tradition to move us beyond the more pernicious and stultifying forms of correlationism that remain abso- lutely typical of the human sciences and much of philosophy (Meillassoux 2010).1 However, rather than retreating to either a reductionist histori- cal materialism or a pessimistic textual postmodernism, I want to push beyond culture theory toward an ontologically stronger description of real human collectivities. 158 Lowrie Society There is another, older tradition of anthropological engagement with an encompassing big Other: theories of society. If those working with “culture” have been primarily interested in the semiotic, thinkers of “society” have been primarily concerned with what Durkheim calls the “concrete reality” of collective human existence. While Durkheim was not the first realist about the social, he was certainly the boldest, and I’d like to focus on his thought at some length here. For Durkheim, society is a literal super-organ- ism, “part of nature and nature’s highest expression. The social realm is a natural realm that differs from others only in its greater complexity” (1995, 17). The product of evolutionary time, a given society is a metabolically active, functionally differentiated whole, utilizing the bodies, practices, and cognition of actually existing humans as its cellular components. Societies are possessed of a “distinct individuality” for Durkheim; they “are born, develop and die independently of one another” (Durkheim 1982, 63). This individuality cannot be understood as “the mere sum of individuals,” but as the “system formed by their association … a specific reality which has its own characteristics” (129). Like any good naturalist, Durkheim assigns no specific telos to the opera- tion of this system beyond its continued self-preservation. Here, his thinking is essentially ecological; the project of providing a “satisfactory explanation of social life” is largely about demonstrating “how the phenomena which are its substance come together to place society in harmony with itself and with the outside world” (Durkheim 1982, 124). This maxim, however, can be misleading; while it clearly animates his inquiry into structural phenom- ena such as the division of labor, it also underlies his interest in the emer- gence and development of ritual practices, religious beliefs, and ultimately the fundamental categories of thought. It is in this respect that Durkheim must be understood as a systems theorist avant la lettre. While the closure of the boundary between social system and physical environment is clearly essential for the development of internal complexity, however, investigating this closure itself would be a rather dry endeavor. Ultimately, for Durkheim, “the primary origin of social processes of any importance must be sought in the constitution of the inner social environment” (1982, 135). At first glance, this might not seem a promising avenue out of culture theory. Durkheim’s view that the social system affords both the medium for, and much of the content of, communication would likely be uncontro- versial for most semiotically inclined thinkers. Many would also follow his view that this system and its meaning-making processes are logically and causally prior to, and in a strong sense encompassing of, the individual. However, the ontological status of the “thing” he is keen to call the social is subtly, but critically, different from that of the “symbolic” as such. The cul- ture, collective representations, or ways of being typical of a given assem- bled group are “the product of an immense cooperation that extends not What Sort of Thing Is the Social? 159 only through space but also through time; to make them, a multitude of different minds have associated, intermixed, and combined their ideas and feelings; long generations have accumulated their experience and knowledge [in them]” (Durkheim 1995, 16). The cognition embodied in the concrete, extended social system is essentially objective, impinging directly and affec- tively (in every sense) upon the psychic systems of the individuals which are its constituents. The social exists to make bodies do particular things, both by hegemony over the field of possible or thinkable maneuvers, and through the more brutal levying of direct, generally moral, sanctions against devi- ance. Even when I think that these impositions “conform to my own senti- ments and when I feel their reality within me, that reality does not cease to be objective, for it is not I who have prescribed these duties,” but rather I have “received them through education” (Durkheim 1982, 50). They exist outside myself and their correlation with my interior mental states is a spatiotemporally contingent product of my being part of a particular organized collective. What is striking about Durkheim’s characterization of these objective social forces, particularly in light of some current calls to think beyond “correlationism” (Meillassoux 2010) and for a newly realist panpsychism (Strawson forthcoming), is that for all of their detachment from individual psychic systems, they do not lose the quality of being, essentially, cognitive phenomena. Indeed, I think that even a minimally consistent reconstruction of the ontology underlying Durkheim’s social thought must read literally his assertion that “there are many ways of acting, thinking and feeling which possess the remarkable property of existing outside the consciousness of the individual” (1982, 51). Ontologically speaking, these forms “cannot be con- fused with organic phenomena, nor with psychical phenomena, which have no existence save in and through the individual consciousness … [Rather, they] constitute a new species and to them must be exclusively assigned the term social” (1982, 52). That said, they remain the continually produced product of ultimately material and historically specific arrangements (it’s a delicate tightrope to walk, and Durkheim admittedly doesn’t always live up to his own ambi- tions, here, but I want to read him charitably, if somewhat against the grain). Despite the high degree of operational closure that a successful social system needs to have attained vis à vis its environment and, indeed, the bod- ies that form its structure, it must nevertheless “enter into … and become organized within” each individual member of the organized assemblage out of which it has sprung and with which it has become coextensive (1995, 211). The ongoing process of cognitive organization within every particular human is recursively linked to broader-level processes of social organiza- tion. What has gone largely uncommented upon in the secondary literature, however, is the degree to which material arrangements play a role in both moments of this recursive, emergent process of organization. In part, this is due to Durkheim’s focus on those moments of active calibration of the 160 Lowrie psychic system to the social as routed through material objects and affects during intense social activity, such as collective effervescence. As his well- worn argument goes, during densely corporate experiences such as ritual festivities, the individual experiences acutely the imposition of an objective, external force upon their psyche:

he must connect those experiences to some external object in a causal relation. Now what does he see around him? What is available to his senses, and what attracts his attention, is the multitude of totemic images surrounding him. He sees the waning and the nurtunja, symbols of the sacred being. He sees the bull roarers and the churingas, on which com- bination of lines that have the same meaning are usually engraved. The decorations on various parts of his body are so many totemic marks. Repeated everywhere and in every form, how could that image fail to stand out in the mind with exceptionally sharp relief? (1995, 222)

The essentially representative or logical characteristic of Durkheim’s think- ing here, however, does not prevent him from realizing that for all its appar- ent contingency, the assignation of force to these objects is real though ideal:

Even though purely ideal, the powers thereby conferred on the object behave as if they were real … The Arunta who has properly rubbed him- self with his churinga feels stronger; he is stronger. … There is a realm of nature in which the formula of idealism is almost literally applicable; that is the social realm. … Here, the role of matter is at a minimum. The object that serves as a prop for the idea does not amount to much as compared to the ideal superstructure under which it disappears. (1995, 229)

I want to suggest that Durkheim, despite the originality and importance of his thought here, ultimately misses the boat by casting his argument in terms of an “as if,” by suggesting that this is primarily about an “ideal superstruc- ture” manipulating material objects qua tokens. Instead, I argue that what Durkheim’s data (and indeed, much of his analysis) really militate for is the recognition that these objects, precisely due to the omnipresence and una- voidability of their material facticity and specificity, play exactly the same sort of affective role within the psychic system, and precisely the same sort of functional role within the social system, as other more recognizably “social” phenomena such as modes of conduct. Indeed, I have a hard time imagining what a “mode of conduct” might mean without reference to a constella- tion of material objects and a reasonably culturally delimited environmental context. This is not to say that a given pattern or form of object can ever have a univocal meaning or function, but rather that these considerations enter into precisely the same sort of co-constitutive cognitive processes as What Sort of Thing Is the Social? 161 do persons and social facts. Indeed, Durkheim argues that collective feelings take on “a kind of physical nature,” coming to “mingle as such with the life of the physical world” (1995, 421); however, he backs away from radicaliz- ing the impulse toward a truly immanent approach contained in his thought, instead arguing that this mingling is a contingent result of the fact that “col- lective feelings become conscious of themselves only by settling upon exter- nal objects,” holding that it is at base a misidentification of cognitive process with material things (1995, 422). In other words, he thinks that the ideal systematicity of the social has real effects and exists objectively in the same way as other “things,” and but wants above all to hedge against the possible reading of this systematicity as only “superstructural” rather than causally prior to and encompassing of social action:

The last thing to do is to see this theory … as merely a refurbishment of historical materialism. That would be a total misunderstanding of my thought. … I in no way mean to say that [a social process] simply translates the material forms and immediate vital necessities of society into another language. I do indeed take it to be obvious that social life depends on and bears the mark of its material base, just as the mental life of the individual depends on the brain and indeed on the whole body. But collective consciousness is something other than a mere epi- phenomenon of its material base, just as individual consciousness is something other than a mere product of the nervous system. If collec- tive consciousness is to appear, a sui generis synthesis of individual con- sciousnesses must occur. (1995, 422)

With this rejection of “historical materialism,” however, we have reached the point at which I diverge from Durkheim. What I do want to take away from his thought here is that the social is both system-like and meaning- ful; made up of human bodies but irreducible to the materiality of their practices; productive of, but recursively constructed by and through, those practices; and essentially objective although participating in the production of subjective experiences.

Machines In moving beyond Durkheim, I’d like to suggest that we can begin to think of societies not as organisms, nor only as ideal systems, but as particular types of machines. Machines do things. They are open to certain flows from the environment, capable of coupling with other machines in definite, gener- ally analytically determinable ways. They have products. They are internally complex, and discrete with respect to their environment, upon and within which they operate. They have material substrates, but are imbued with an incorporeal systematicity irreducible to these substrates. Analytically 162 Lowrie speaking, a focus on machines tends to push us beyond a preoccupation with distinctions between nature and culture, immaterial and material. It provides us with a capacious and flexible vocabulary for the description of structures and processes alike that captures much of the empirical work done by new materialisms, while remaining compatible with theoretical insights from elsewhere in the human sciences. Thinking about society as a machine in this sense is not without prec- edence in the social scientific cannon. Although coming to the term itself later in his life, we can already see a machinic logic at play in the early work of Lewis Mumford (e.g., 1934). Mumford was fascinated by both the high internal complexity and the massive output of the organized human collectivities—the “megamachines” (1967)—that began to emerge after the development of agricultural civilization: the technically mediated, societally ordered hierarchies that emerge in relatively complex processes of civiliza- tion, such as the building of the pyramids or the waging of world wars. However, I think that we can, with an unjaundiced eye, see some of the same material-semiotic dynamics that Mumford described also at work in less complex or extended processes, such as the organizing of a village for the building of a canoe (see Malinowksi 1950 [1922], 105–45). I want to follow this line of flight from Mumford through Deleuze and Guattari, who were themselves quite invested in his work. In what follows, I argue that the machines we call societies themselves produce and are produced by colloca- tions in time and space of a great variety of different machines whose onto- logical status ranges widely from “material” to “ideal.” The ontological consubstantiality of these two levels of being here is a product not only of the systematicity of the processes and structures that have for so long been the object of social inquiry, but also of the actual distribution and arrange- ment of the material substrate of these ideal features. Indeed, I agree with Bryant (2014) that this former systematicity itself is unintelligible without reference to this material base, although not for that reason conceptually indistinct therefrom. On this reading, societies are systems which have as their substrate complexly interwoven, dynamic meshworks of human and nonhuman animal bodies; sources of energy such as animal flesh, oil, or uranium; transpersonal semiotic material embodied in brains and other cul- tural texts; practices of all sorts extended across time; and infrastructural objects such as villages, railway systems, coins, anvils, electricity grids, or carved totems—indeed, they thrum with the “continual whirr of machines” (Deleuze and Guattari 1977, 2). The interplay of material and ideal or, as Bryant puts it, corporeal and incorporeal (2014, 28), machines in society is not categorically different, however, from the play across that divide found in other complex machines. We have known at least since the early days of cybernetics that in any suf- ficiently autopoetic system, there are features whose functioning exceeds the ability of a simple declarative description of its components to cap- ture. The systematic coherence of machines like human bodies, financial What Sort of Thing Is the Social? 163 markets, or the masses is a perplexing surplus of the more-than-actual that both relies and falls back upon its actual base. This surplus rankles when we approach collectivities from a “sociological” point of view, seem- ing to call for the sort of more-than-materialist explanations advanced by Durkheim. What, ultimately, is the ontological explanation for the ability of seemingly ideational processes to effect material things? How, really, is the rubber of system and structure even able to meet the road of actual stuff (or is it vice versa)? It’s a tricky question, and raises a conceptual problem that has plagued thought about matter since at least Descartes, and prob- ably Lucretius. However, I find in the rather chaotic thought of Deleuze and Guattari the hint of an answer, at least as regards the social. In their notion of a recording surface or plane of consistency cutting across and unit- ing human collectivities, and of a full body without organs underlying the organizational strata of simple and complex societies alike, I find the begin- nings of a profound answer to the ontological questions which Durkheim has left us. Deleuze and Guattari are committed process philosophers. They are interested in the ongoing flow of being, at least here understood to be syn- onymous with a process of production, which they understand to form the substance of existence. In this flow, there is “no distinction between man and nature,” and “production is immediately consumption and a recording process, without any sort of mediation” (1977, 3). This immediate produc- tion-consumption-recording, however, could not happen intelligibly with- out a non-productive surface against which to articulate itself: “a full body that functions as a socius” (10). As they explain, their conceptual grounding here is not novel, despite the language of bodies without organs.2 After all,

this is the body that Marx is referring to when he says that [capital] is not the product of labor, but rather appears as its natural or divine presupposition. In fact, it does not restrict itself merely to opposing productive forces in and of themselves. It falls back on all production, constituting a surface over which the forces and agents of production are distributed, thereby appropriating for itself all surplus production and arrogating to itself both the whole and the parts of the process, which now seem to emanate from it as a quasi-cause. Forces and agents come to represent a miraculous form of its own power: they appear to be ‘miraculated’ by it. In a word, the socius as a full body forms a surface where all production is recorded, whereupon the entire process appears to emanate from this recording surface. (10)

This body is without organs in a quite literal sense: it is not organized. It is a smooth, un-striated surface with no hierarchical or topological divi- sions, possessed of no systematic processes composed of discrete clusters of activity.3 Assemblages of machines such as societies or people participate in 164 Lowrie both the body without organs and the strata of organization. The ­former is the full unity, the plane of consistency, that in capitalism is identified with “capital”—the pluripotent stuff that both records and appears to miraculate production—while the latter is the actual, historically contingent arrange- ments proper to a given assemblage. This arrangement is the type of concrete organization that Durkheim was methodologically interested in throughout his career. It can only appear, somewhat paradoxically, secondary, both logi- cally and ontologically to this essentially nonproductive and full body, seem- ingly produced thereby.4 In Anti-Oedipus (1977), at least, it is clear that this is a causal ideology maintained by power. However, it is ultimately impos- sible to analytically extract either the full body without organs or the strata of organization from the real, historically contingent processes that have produced both of these features of social reality. The body without organs of, say, capital, is inextricable from the arrangements of organ-machines that play across and are recorded on its surface. In any given collectivity, then, we always encounter a historically contin- gent “distribution,” an organ-ization, of machines such as persons, forms of labor, social groupings, and technical processes “in relation to the non- productive [socius]” (italics mine; Deleuze and Guattari 1977, 12). These machines “attach themselves to the body without organs as so many points of disjunction, between which an entire network of new synthesis is now woven, marking the surface off into co-ordinates” (12). However, “although the organ-machines attach themselves to the body without organs, the latter continues nonetheless to be without organs and does not become an organ- ism in the ordinary sense of the word” (15). The world of social organiza- tion that articulates itself against this socius is a field of distributed flows and processes, of productive machines passionately and ontologically dependent for their very existence as distinct entities on their subordination to and cod- ing on an essentially non-productive inscription surface. The production of inscription has always been “the prime function incumbent upon the socius” (33). Without inscription on the socius, there simply cannot be social organization. This is a fairly straightforward claim of empirical fact, as the strata of organization that we encounter across the anthropological record make quite clear. Social theorists as diverse in orientation as Malinowski (1960 [1944]) and Luhmann (1977) both agree that development of collectivities is tied to increasingly specific coding and differentiation of the processes, substances, and groupings in which humans participate. To that end, the socius “works to codify [flows], to inscribe them, to record them, to see that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channeled, regulated” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977, 33). A place for everything and everything in its place. The unmanaged flow is anathema to the social machine; it threatens to destabilize the very logic of totality and encompassment that underlies the project of being a society at all.5 For this reason, on the level of the becoming-organized, “every machine has a sort of code built into it, stored up inside it” (38). It is the job of What Sort of Thing Is the Social? 165 the socius to manage the processual articulation of these codes with one another. It does so by acting as a standardized horizon for their inscription or recording. It is a plane of immanence and consistency, nonproductive but traversing production itself, which allows the various machines to articulate with one another, to lob bricks of code at one another, to flow through and around and between one another. Atop the silent, dead facticity of the socius, there is a whole world of proliferation, parasitism, and symbiosis of technical, biological, psychic, geological, hydrological, juridical, linguis- tic codes. The work of the socius is to organize these codes; to, in their inscription upon its body, develop an “entire system of shunting [blocks of code] along certain tracks,” of making code immanent to itself, and of extracting value from the disjunctions, slicings-off, and cobblings-together that machines enact upon the chains of code.6 Without the socius, there would be neither meaning nor surplus value. Despite its role as the locally universal media through which machines become properly social, rather than merely hungry for any-connection-at-all, the socius is never total: “the body without organs is produced as a whole, but in its own particular place within the process of production, alongside the parts that it neither unifies nor totalizes” (43). However, through the inscription of machinic processes on an immanent plane possessed of both positive ontological status and spatiotemporal horizon, it both pretends to and succeeds in asymptotically totalizing the field of desiring production.

Pigs For Deleuze and Guattari, this positive ontological status is historically con- tingent. Despite not having organs, to be a socius is to be a particular body, which organizes the flows articulated against and inscribed upon it in a particular way. They argue that there have been three distinct forms of this body, supplanting one another in an evolutionary succession: the primitive body of the earth gives way inevitably to the barbaric, overcoding body of the despot, which in turn crumbles under its own internal contradictions and is supplanted by the schizophrenic body of capital. I reject the Eurocentricity of and the evolutionary inevitability that they ascribe to this progression, as well as the idea that any ternary logical schema could adequately capture all of the possible ontological bases for society. However, I would like here to look a little closer at the body of the earth qua ideal-typical understanding of small-scale societies, because I do think that it forces us to think beyond Deleuze and Guattari’s own understanding of immanence and inscription in productively new ways; I will return to their understanding of capitalism a little further on. In Deleuze and Guattari’s telling, small-scale societies write themselves upon the body of the earth. Contra then-contemporary anthropological arguments about the emergence of society, they argue that “society is not first of all a milieu for exchange where the essential would be to circulate or 166 Lowrie to cause to circulate, but rather a socius of inscription where the essential thing is to mark and be marked. There is circulation only if inscription requires or permits it” (1977, 149). The business of what Durkheim and Mauss (1963) call “primitive classification” is logically and ontologically enframing of any economic activity as such; “flows of women and children, flows of herds and seed, sperm flows, flows of shit, menstrual flows: noth- ing must escape coding” (149). The essential business of the social machine in small-scale societies, then, is not the development of material culture or the exchange of women as such, but of managing the “collective investment of the organs that plugs desire into the socius and assembles social pro- duction and desiring-production into a whole on the earth” (Deleuze and Guattari 1977, 142).7 This is achieved, they argue, mostly through practices of kinship: alliance and filiation are written on the earth through territo- rial reconfigurations at once material and semiotic; kinship systems and the real distribution of social power are coordinated to the distribution of bod- ies and flows of both goods and effects on the earth cum socius. The full body of this earth records these circulations or flows, coding them, render- ing them organized, meaningful, and intelligible, while appearing to be their cause. Kinship so understood is not a system itself; it is a practical activ- ity that obtains systematicity only insofar as it is coded systematically (see Faubion 2001). In actuality, at the level of the desiring machines themselves, those studying kinship have long known that the practical gambits involved in securing reproductive partners, assuring univocal lines of descent, and managing the debts and credits of alliance are essentially local phenomena, carried out between small groups rather than large collectivities and ulti- mately breaking many of the systematic rules operative at the macro scale. However, this does not mean that a molecular, Tardean sociology is in fact necessary and sufficient, or that the systematicity of the social is merely an anamorphic feature of second-order observation. Rather, it means that quo- tidian practise and the systematic are operative at a different level of coding and organization. I think that the work of Roy Rappaport shows this well. One of the earli- est explicit systems-thinkers in anthropology, his broadly ecological research among the Tsembaga Maring of New Guinea (1968) shows how this pro- ductive split between processual activity and coding on the socius plays out in the context of a ritual complex involving pigs, war, and ancestors. The Tsembaga, “a group of shifting horticulturalists living in the Bismarck Mountains of New Guinea,” are a territorially demarcated subgroup of a larger Maring-speaking regional formation (1). They operate as a segmen- tary whole in exchanges and hostilities with similarly scaled adjacent groups, and function as a population in the ecological sense; that is, as a “unit com- posed of an aggregate of organisms having in common certain distinctive means whereby they maintain a set of shared trophic relations with other living and nonliving components” of their territory (224). They are also what Rappaport, drawing upon Durkheim, describes as a “congregation,” What Sort of Thing Is the Social? 167 that is, as an aggregate of humans “who regard their collective well-being to be dependent upon a common body of ritual performances” (1). There is a concrete and dynamic relationship between these two levels of collectivity, however. The primary ritual complex of the Tsembaga, the kaiko, serves to regulate the material relationships between “people, pigs, and gardens,” dynamically structuring agricultural, hunting, and alimentary practices, res- idence patterns, and internal decision-making processes, as well as cyclical alliances and hostilities with neighboring congregations:

Maring warfare was held in abeyance as long as the debts to supernatural and ordinary allies were outstanding, warfare being resumed only once the aggressors had acquitted themselves of these debts—through the massive slaughter of pigs in the kaiko, among other means. In prepa- ration for the kaiko, pigs were accumulated and fattened. As the pig herds mounted, the effort required to tend them also mounted until the demands upon women and their labor, in particular, reached the limits of tolerance. At the behest of the women, the kaiko or massive slaughter of pigs was then staged. (Biersack 1999, 6)

As the pig population grows, they shift from being useful machines, who eat human waste and surplus, weed gardens, and provide companionship, to burdens on the alimentary system of the Tsembaga, rampaging through neighbors’ gardens and ultimately requiring the cultivation of food specif- ically for their upkeep; sociality as well as subsistence becomes strained, and the residences of the Tsembaga shift from nucleated around the ritual grounds to dispersed throughout the territory, both to reduce the friction caused by rampaging pigs damaging neighbos’ gardens and to manage the increased number of gardens necessary to feed the herd. Ultimately, the Tsembaga arrive at a judgment that a sufficient mass of pigs has been reached to facilitate the repayment of debt to both spiritual and human allies, and they re-nucleate to conduct a massive pig slaughter, allowing the boundary-trees planted during the last truce to be uprooted and for hostili- ties to resume. Much in Tsembaga life squares firmly with Deleuze and Guattari’s under- standing of societies that write themselves upon the earth; at each stage of warfare and the ritual process, exchange of goods and reproductive services as well as propitiation to the spirits seem to proceed in a distinctly ter- ritorial register. Indeed, membership in the congregation itself is not held to be primarily about biological filiation but about territorial affiliation, demonstrated by newcomers through participation in quite literal rituals of boundary-making and -shaping. Conversely, those who dwell in the terri- tory but do not participate in the ritual cycle are not truly part of the “con- gregation” (Rappaport 1967, 19). Interestingly, for all his commitment to ecological literalism in his description of the Tsembaga as a “population,” 168 Lowrie Rappaport himself understands these processes in terms highly abstracted from their concrete expansion over any actual territory, with real territorial claims and habitation being merely temporary instantiations of processes occurring in an essentially alocal cybernetic system. To put it another way, there is nothing of the visceral experience of territorialization in his descrip- tion of the systematicity of the ritual cycle, however much it operates upon highly local or “earthy” substrates. Instead, he uses the dry and placeless language of early cybernetic thinking:

Like thermostats, rituals have a binary aspect. As the thermostat switches on and off, affecting the amount of heat produced by the furnace and the temperature of the medium, so the rituals of the Tsembaga are initiated and completed, affecting the size of the pig population, the amount of land under cultivation, the amount of labor expended, the frequency of warfare, and other components of the sys- tem. The programs that should be undertaken to correct the deviation of variables from their acceptable ranges are fixed. All that need be decided is whether in fact deviations have occurred. The Tsembaga reach such decisions through discussion and then the formation of a consensus. (234)

It is critical to note that this working toward consensus, the process of “mak- ing the talk one,” occurs in the “absence of authoritative political statuses or offices” (1967: 18). The discussions look a great deal more like a game of go than one of chess (to borrow a metaphor from Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 352–53). Rather than a differentiated, organized set of pieces—of actors with biographically fixed roles engaging in stereotyped maneuvers—we see momentary coalitions of monadic, individuated, but functionally identi- cal tokens or speakers appearing and dissolving without respect for either inherited or territorial hierarchy. No one is privileged to intervene in the ritual cycle on the basis of their own position within that cycle; instead, the talk proceeds through constant reference back to an underlying, cosmologi- cal substrate of ancestral and fertility spirits shared by all members of the congregation. Despite this substrate’s articulation with the body of earth, in the form of differently territorialized groups of spirits, it is ontologically distinct therefrom insofar as the processes of coding which it enables and requires are themselves free to range over the actual territory of the congre- gation. It is, in other words, a body without organs that records territorial coding as only one of many forms of inscription which it organizes and distributes over its surface. For Rappaport, the life of congregations is characterized by a fundamen- tal, insurmountable divide, with the systematic processes critical to societal autopoiesis (which occur in the “operational environment”) both dictating but produced by the actual quotidian lifeworld inhabited by the people who What Sort of Thing Is the Social? 169 form their substrate (the “cognized environment”). Rappaport’s key insight here is that ritual is never, insofar as it involves practical action in the world, understandable without concrete reference to its actual interventions into the ongoing ecological processes of collective life. However, the character of the divide between these two levels is not an object of analytic focus, and he has been rightly criticized for a failure to specify the ontological status of the “cybernetic entities” governing the interactions that occur in the opera- tional environment (Smith 1984, 53, quoted in Biersack 1999, 6). It seems to me that Rappaport’s critical mistake comes in failing to understand that the operational environment cannot be understood without reference to the cognized environment. His cleavage of practice from the semiotic consist- ency that flows through and around that practice was a necessary first step beyond earlier accounts of ritual that held it to be so much hand-waving, but the work of synthesizing practice and semiosis remains. I think that the concept of the socius as I have figured it here makes critical steps toward this synthesis. A Durkheimian revision of Deleuze and Guattari suggests that societies function to produce what we might call clearings in being. That is to say, as a form of organization, societies open sensible spaces (what I have been calling recording surfaces) within the full, meaningless chaos of the world in itself, allowing meaningful ontological and semiotic conjugation to occur in the first place. On my reading, the only way to understand the full body that renders the Tsembaga’s practice consistent is as the product of a particular and historically contingent arrangement of material–semiotic components, rather than of their place within evolutionary schema. Societies are the product of particular aggregates of human beings. The Tsembaga socius is produced by, and determines, a particular tension between the mobility of bodies and the emergence of a class of immobile social machines such as homes, swidden plots, and boundary-trees; quasi-mobiles such as pigs and sweet potatoes; practical complexes such as rituals, subsistence strategies, and techniques of warfare; and “cultural” or textual resources such as collective representations about the nature of spirits. Its function is to produce the consistency necessary for ecologically sustainable and psychi- cally coherent collective life to emerge. The rituals described by Rappaport, then, must be understood as precisely about uniting the cognized environ- ment with the operational. Their meaningfulness, their semiotic operations, are part and parcel of their material efficaciousness at the level of the social, and this latter is only able to be achieved through the semiotic consistency offered by the full body of the ancestors, the nonproductive surface against which all activity is organized and upon which it is recorded.

Beyond Schizophrenia: Capitalism and Infrastructure Any good Marxist will tell you that the “mystification” required for this relatively small-scale system to operate is also found within today’s highly complex global finance capitalism. As should be obvious from this example, 170 Lowrie however, focus on either the mystification or what is “really going on” at the level of material processes is a mistake. The practical efficacy of a complex financial instrument in today’s global information capitalism lies neither solely in a cultural agreement about the nature of value nor in its straightforward reflection of the empirical reality of productive labor occur- ring “somewhere” down the line. Rather, it is to be found in its ability to articulate both of these things together upon the recording surface of the full body of capital. Unlike the body of the earth, which aims to totalize the field of desiring production by means of a universal code (in the example above, the code of alliance and filiation), Deleuze and Guattari see capital, in its positivity, as a plane of consistency whose function of adequation no longer relies primarily upon its ability to code. Instead, it relies upon its miraculous ability to reduce everything to quantity and vector. Indeed, they argue,

the capitalist machine is incapable of providing a code that will apply to the whole of the social field. By substituting money for the very notion of a code, it has created an axiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and further in the direction of the deterritorialization of the socius. (1977, 33, italics mine)

Of course, capitalism is not ignorant of code as such, however “illiterate” it may be; rather, it is that “the capitalist use of [code] is different in nature; it is realized or becomes concrete within the field of immanence peculiar to capitalism itself, with the appearance of the technical means of expres- sion that correspond to the generalized decoding of flows” (240). That is to say, with the introduction of digital computing and perfection of a certain tendency of capitalism within contemporary financial markets, there is no longer any need to say anything at all about what things are or might be; it is enough to have developed the technical means—the financial instruments, but also the literal machines of computation, just-in-time production, and global transport—to inscribe things on the socius according to their abstract quantity and to manage their circulation through an axiomatic of pure vec- tor, only barely territorialized. Committed to playing accelerationist Marxists to the end, Deleuze and Guattari see in capitalism the ability to destroy the socius, for desiring pro- duction itself to push this tendency toward deterritorialization so far as to consummate a detachment of the flows moving across its surface from their recording surface. They imagine a schizophrenic utopia: a world where, let loose from the socius, desiring machines are able to recognize their own self-sufficiency, to recognize the essentially nonproductive character of the recording surface and find lines of flight toward new forms of organization that reflect new modes of multiplicity and self-sufficiency. I think, however, that a close look at the actual arrangements of global finance capital today reveals the naivety, however hopeful, underlying this mode of thinking What Sort of Thing Is the Social? 171 quantity in its relation to code, and to power.8 In today’s complex financial instruments, as well as in the actualities of global flows of debt and capital, particularly in terms of their articulation with more traditional institutions such as central banks and local markets, I think we see the true extent to which capital is able to capture lines of flight, to pull abstract vectors back from the brink of pure velocity, and to reterritorialize them in ways that produce powerfully one-sided flows of surplus value. I think that Deleuze and Guattari made a mistake (perhaps understand- able at the time) of conflating processes occurring at the organizational level with the logic of inscription actually operative in finance capital. There has been excellent work by anthropologists of globalization pointing out the ability of global capital to extract surplus value from every movement between local and global, highlighting the structural interest capital has in maintaining certain frictions (Tsing 2005) and disjunctures (Appadurai 1990), even in flows of “pure” quantity.9 Further, however, I wonder to what extent even the most complex of contemporary financial instruments can be understood themselves as examples of the tendency that Deleuze and Guattari are so keen to identify as axiomatic within capitalism. Clearly, quantities and vectors are not themselves code, are not themselves coded; however, the mathematical operations performed upon them, which in turn rely upon a vast semiotic-material machinery for their enactment, are them- selves highly coded, highly territorial affairs. There are still “social organs of decision, administration, reaction, [and] inscription … [which] require a whole apparatus of regulation whose principal organ is the state” (1977, 251) precisely in order to achieve the consistency to be found in the inscrip- tion of pure quantity and vector. In other words, I agree with Deleuze and Guattari that the plane of consistency typical of global finance capital operates with an axiomatic of quantity. However, I believe that they have too hastily conflated an organi- zational feature of late capitalism with the substance or epochal truth of the recording body itself. That is to say, it is evident that quantity and vector have replaced legible codes in much of the processual distribution of goods and effects in contemporary societies; this has only been possible, however, through an intensification of coding, the calibration of codes to the internal logics of quantity and vector (MacKenzie 2006), and the standardization of codes across the surface of the earth (Kelty 2005); in short, the production of a global consistency, a flat clearing for certain types of being, in which vector and quantity can appear as if finally able to break free of territory and code. The work of global informational-finance capital since at least the advent of digital technology has been, in large part, the work of developing these standards and implementations. The story of capital is not (only) the story of ever-increasing contradiction and chaotic free play. It is also the story of the establishment of a real, material, and semiotic megamachine incorporating not only textual-discursive propositions about the nature of labor and, indeed, capital itself, but exacting standards and implementations 172 Lowrie of infrastructural systems based upon those standards, charged with both information handling and the transmutation of reality into quantity. It should be noted, of course, that Deleuze and Guattari would reject wholeheartedly these Durkheimian modifications to their understanding of the capitalist socius. Their own Tardean understanding of society is as an aggregate of various strivings that can only retroactively be inscribed on the socius. The socius, for them, is always secondary, in the sense of being parasitic on the more fundamental pulsations of molecular passions. What I have presented here is a substantially less optimistic understanding of the relationship between desiring production and its frames or coding than we get from Tarde, or from Deleuze and Guattari themselves. While desiring- production might be logically anterior to the socius, I want to argue that it only attains something like a durable form with reference to the fields of coding, or to the axioms of capital, that appear as its object cause. For Deleuze and Guattari, immanence and desire are ontologically fundamental; I have tried to suggest that the admixture of Durkheim to their thought, however, shows us that immanence is something achieved by internally complex collectivities, without which desire can only ever be meaningless chaos. From this perspective, the syntheses typical of naturecultural matter- ings can only happen against a horizon of being carved off from the chaos of the world more generally. This has concrete political consequences, of course. Were they around to object, Deleuze and Guattari might well paint me as the worst sort of lib- eral reformist, simply desiring my own submission too fervently to see the inherent fascism of my position. My only response, I suppose, is that I’m an empiricist, and I happen to think that metaphysics can’t just postulate a rev- olutionary alternative for itself by fiat. All of human history qua human his- tory has been the story of process prefigured by frame, of actions which only materialize against the encompassing space of reasons opened by society. I am more than willing to admit that something, some form of what Guattari (1995) later admits to be chaos, might exist prior to the social. However, any form of contemporary politics that claims to flow from (or, for that matter, simply be consistent with) a materialist, historicist ontology must get rid of the nostalgia for the pure, for unorganized desire lurking behind the thousand blooming hybrid flowers of A Thousand Plateaus (cf. Latour 1991). In its place, we must be clear about specifying the historically contin- gent nature of desiring-production within a given form of its organization. This means that we, as analysts, must attend to the realities of the large- scale material–semiotic arrangements structuring contemporary desire. It is important to remember that these material supports, though they be logi- cally and even ontologically secondary to the consistency which they create and rely upon for their existence, in fact intervene back into the primary process of production. Capital, after all, is only a quasi-cause, appearing to miraculate the processes of production encoded on the socius, and is itself nonproductive. Real historical processes, not this body without organs, make things happen. Further, if—as I have suggested—Deleuze and Guattari What Sort of Thing Is the Social? 173 misunderstand something fundamental about the nature of that socius in contemporary capitalism, if there are still highly developed and, structur- ally speaking, essential processes of coding and territorialization that rely heavily upon the state for their orchestration and implementation, we can hardly rely upon their historical just-so stories about the ternary structure of sociological evolution for either political or epistemological guidance. If I am at all on to something here, then the ethnographic study of infrastructure in both complex and small-scale societies takes on a vital importance. However, what is critical in the turn to infrastructure is the focus on infrastructure as organizational matrix, that is, on its logically and causally prior relationship to vector and quantity, to force and action. This is what has been consistently unthinkable within a new materialist framework. In Bennett, for example, we see a sophisticated physics of, on the one hand, the emergent behaviors of the grid qua assemblage, and on the other of its role as an actor in an immanent network of political-ontological forces. My approach, however, would reject her understanding of some timeless- universal “being” as an ontological given, as an always-already flat field upon which agential relations act themselves out. Similarly, the flat ontology of Bryant envisions the world as a full plentitude of self-sufficient machines, coupling and forming ecologies without any description of the field in which such activity is occurring. My central argument has been that the flatness disclosed by object-oriented and network thinking is not a property of the cosmos or world itself. Rather, I have suggested that it is what we are left with once societies have opened and ordered spaces or clearings in the chaos of that world. On my somewhat perverse, Durkheimian reading of Deleuze and Guattari, the social is that which is responsible for the production of a particular form of flatness, that is, material-semiotic immanence or con- sistency. It is this immanence that inaugurates something like conceptual normativity or a space of reasons, in other words. For me, this is why the investigation of infrastructure is so important. The infrastructural compo- nents of this immanence-producing megamachine are the determinants of the particular modalities of coding, recording, and production typical of a given social so produced, of the particular forms of normativity typical of given collectivities.

Conclusion Many scholars working under the banner of the new materialism have expressed impatience with social theory and continental philosophy’s preoc- cupation with what they call “epistemology,” and their desire for a (re)turn to “ontology.” For me, as a social scientist relatively unburdened by a disci- plinary commitment to at least this type of truth game, however, the proof of ontology is to be found in the pudding of methodology. That is to say, the efficacy of an ontology for framing ongoing research projects seems to me the best proof that it got something about the world out there essentially right. Durkheim got something essentially right in his discovery of social 174 Lowrie facts; Deleuze and Guattari got something essentially right in their discovery of the core role played by coding and tracing in the dynamic systematicity of social processes; new materialists like Bryant have gotten something essen- tially right in their (re)discovery of the vibrancy and primacy of matterings. In each case, this rightness seems to have been demonstrated not by the sophistication of their theoretical arguments but in the coherence and nov- elty of the research programs they have inaugurated. In this chapter, I have worked abductively to forge a synthetic understanding of the social as a real object that remains faithful to what I see as the authentic, empirical insights of these three traditions. Ultimately, the coherence and validity of my own speculative framework remains to be tested through concrete empirical research.

Notes 1 While I find much of Meillassoux’s analysis problematic, we converge in the recognition that so-called posthumanism has, ultimately, done little to produce forms of inquiry that would push thought beyond an analysis of the encounter between human minds and the world. 2 This is a notoriously slippery concept, which plays a number of roles within Deleuze and Guattari’s own thought. At its most capacious, it signifies simply any full, deeper, unpartitioned whole underlying an apparently differentiated assem- blage. At its most specific, it becomes an almost clinical term for a particular aspect of, or orientation toward, the human body (my own project, as specified in the following paragraphs, does not make use of this second sense of the term). In the former sense, the body without organs is tightly allied to their concept of a plane of consistency or immanence, which cuts across specific instances of orga- nization. Indeed, sometimes a plane of consistency is a body without organs, as is (mostly) the case in this paper. Further, the concept of the body without organs, like that of the plane of consistency, flickers back and forth between a generalized feature of reality as such and a highly specific achievement, such as the consis- tency proper to certain social formations or even friendships (see Ansell-Pearson, this volume). In his suitably hallucinatory introduction to A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Brian Massumi suggests that like a brick, a concept can “be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window” (xii). Although I am here more inclined to build at least some sort of a structure than to smash a window, and so strive toward architectural specificity in my use of the concept, I agree with Massumi that ultimately “the question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts does it make it possible to think?” (xiii). 3 Although, later, with A Thousand Plateaus (1987) we do begin to get something like a kinematics of the body without organs; a mechanics of swelling intensities, of vague, sweeping, nomadic movements that heave themselves across it like so many ocean swells. In Anti-Oedipus (1977), however, it is primarily an inert body. 4 Though, historico-causally speaking, the emergence of this body is understood by Deleuze and Guattari as well as Durkheim as posterior to the real activity of sufficiently developed human aggregates. 5 Durkheim knew this well. He would absolutely agree with Deleuze and Guattari here that “even the most repressive and the most deadly forms of social reproduc- tion are produced by desire within the organization that is the consequence of … What Sort of Thing Is the Social? 175 production under various conditions” (1977, 29). The social both gives us and is the product of the enthusiasm, the lust for a sense of fullness, completion, total- ity, and intelligibility that drives human collectives to so violently sanction devi- ance. Perhaps more explicitly than Durkheim, Deleuze and Guattari nevertheless think that there might be better and worse ways to be written on the social, for collectivities to look after the codes that render them such (see 1977, 184). All of these thinkers, however, agree upon the objectivity of that passionate investment in boundary-making and keeping. Where Deleuze and Guattari move us beyond Durkheim is in their discovery of the primacy of inscription for sociality as such. 6 Note, however, that “the chains are called ‘signifying chains’ because they are made up of signs, but these signs are not themselves signifying. The code resem- bles not so much a language as a jargon, an open-ended, polyvocal formation. The nature of the signs within it is insignificant, as these signs have little or noth- ing to do with what supports them” (1977, 38). What matters is their systematic inscription, which operates with a logic much closer to the Derridean world of traces than the Lacanian world of signification. 7 If we take Deleuze and Guattari seriously here, an entire tradition of anthropo- logical thought (from Mauss and Levi-Strauss to Weiner and Appadurai) and of economic sociology (from Simmel and Polanyi to Bourdieu and Giddens), which ground the formation of collectivities and the business of exchange in the pri- macy of circulation and humanity’s horror in the face of stasis, would need to be reevaluated through a more properly semiotic understanding of why things might begin to move at all. 8 It is telling that in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) we see an almost wholesale retreat from macroscalar, revolutionary analysis of Anti-Oedipus (1977) and the turn to an entirely more personological form of dispensing gnomic wisdom, not entirely distinct from the aims of psychoanalysis itself—paralleling, perhaps unsurprisingly, broader changes in the strategy of the intellectual left over in the decades following 1968. Even the concepts of the body without organs and con- sistency shift in focus, in their recapitulation, from the sociological to the literally corporal or psychic registers. 9 Moving beyond sociological debates about homogenization, glocalization, and deterritorialization, these ethnographically informed theorists have been working with scale to understand contemporary forms of power. While they acknowledge the remarkable consistency and efficacy of contemporary financial, technical, and cultural networks across a range of local contexts, they argue that the power of such networks must be located in their imbrication with the real, material processes operative in those contexts. Their work details how the disjunctures between flows of people, money, and media typical of late globalization have produced both new conflicts and new opportunities for capitalization (Appadurai 1990; 2001); how the articulation of Chinese communism with global capitalism, and the careful management or tactical severing of the flows that cross between them, has produced new forms of biopolitical sovereignty (Ong 2012); and how working the boundaries between the immaterial networks of finance capital and local farming practises, for example, has allowed Matsutake mushrooms and their harvesters to eke out a living in the ruins of late industrialism (Tsing 2015).

Works Cited Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theory, Culture and Society 7(2): 295–310. Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 2001. Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Benedict, Ruth. 1934. Patterns of Culture. New York: Houghton Mifflin. 176 Lowrie Bennett, Jane. 2005. “The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout.” Public Culture 17(3): 445–66. Biersack, Aletta. 1999. “From the ‘New Ecology’ to the New Ecologies.” American Anthropologist 101(1): 5–18. Bryant, Levi. 2014. Onto-cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Clifford, James and George Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1977. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: Penguin Classics. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Durkheim, Emile. 1982. The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: Free Press. Durkheim, Emile. 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press. Durkheim, Emile and Marcel Mauss. 1963. Primitive Classification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Faubion, James. 2001. The Ethics of Kinship: Ethnographic Inquiries. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kelty, Chris. 2005. “Geeks, Internets, and Recursive Publics.” Cultural Anthropology 20 (2): 185–214. Kroeber, Alfred. 1917. “The Superorganic.” American Anthropologist 19 (2): 163–213. Latour, Bruno. 1991. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 1977. “Differentiation of Society.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 2 (1): 29–53. MacKenzie, Donald. 2006. An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1950 [1922]. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1960 [1944]. “The Functional Theory.” In A Scientific Theory of Culture, 145–76. New York: Oxford University Press. Meillassoux, Quentin. 2010. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. New York: Bloomsbury. Mumford, Lewis. 1934. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company. Mumford, Lewis. 1967. The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Ong, Aiwa. 2012. “Powers of Sovereignty: State, People, Wealth, Life.” Focaal— Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 64: 24–35. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1906. “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism.” The Monist 16 (4): 492–546. Sahlins, Marshall. 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. What Sort of Thing Is the Social? 177 Strawson, Galen. Forthcoming. “Real Direct Realism.” In Coates, P. and Coleman, S. (eds.), Phenomenal Qualities: Sense, Perception, and Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsing, Anna. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Turner, Victor. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tylor, Edward Burnett. 1920 [1871]. Primitive Culture. New York: J. P. Putnam’s Sons. Wolf, Eric. 1999. Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. This page intentionally left blank Part III Monism, Liveliness, and the Problem of Scale This page intentionally left blank 8 The Cognitive Nonconscious and the New Materialisms

N. Katherine Hayles Duke University

Among the promising developments for reassessing the traditional humanist­ subject are the new materialisms. Their diversity notwithstanding, the theo- retical frameworks proceeding under this banner generally argue for a simi- lar set of propositions. Chief among these is decentering the human subject, along with the characteristics that have long been identified with human exceptionalism, including language, rationality, and higher consciousness. Also prominent is the idea that matter, rather than being passive and inert, is “lively” and “vibrant” (Bennett 2010). In some versions of the new mate- rialisms, a strong emphasis on ontology emerges (Barad 2007, Parisi 2004, Braidotti 2006 and 2013), accompanied by a reframing of ontological premises, often along Deleuzian lines emphasizing metastabilities, dynamic processes, and assemblages (Grosz 2002 and 2011, Parikka 2010, Bennett 2010). In general, these approaches tend to locate the human on a con- tinuum with nonhuman life and material processes rather than as a privi- leged special category (Braidotti 2006, Grosz 2002 and 2011). Finally, they emphasize transformative potentials, often linking these with the capacity for new kinds of political actions (Grosz 2002 and 2011, Braidotti 2006). After the baroque intricacies of the linguistic turn, these approaches arrive like bursts of oxygen to a fatigued brain. Focusing on the grittiness of actual material processes, they introduce materiality, along with its complex inter- actions, into humanities discourses that for too long and too often have been oblivious to the fact that all higher consciousness and linguistic acts, no matter how sophisticated and abstract, must in the first instance emerge from underlying material processes.1 Despite their considerable promises, the new materialisms also have sig- nificant limitations. Conspicuously absent from their considerations are consciousness and cognition, presumably because of the concern that if they were introduced, it would be all too easy to slip into received ideas and lose the radical edge that the focus on materiality provides. This leads to a per- formative contradiction: only beings with higher consciousness can read and understand these arguments, yet few if any new materialists acknowledge the functions that cognition enables for living and nonliving entities. Reading them, one looks in vain for recognition of cognitive processes, although they must necessarily have been involved for these discourses to exist at all. 182 Hayles A new materialist might object that there are already plenty of discourses, historical and contemporary, that play up the roles of consciousness and cognition, and it is not her obligation to rehearse or amend these in order to foreground materiality. Separating materiality from cognition does not, however, strengthen the case for materiality. On the contrary, it weakens it, for it erases the critical role played by materiality in creating the struc- tures and organizations from which consciousness and cognition emerge. While this is by no means all that the “liveliness” of materiality can do, it is a particularly fraught and consequential form of material agency, and to ignore it leads to a very partial and incomplete picture. Moreover, such erasures encourage overly general analyses, in which crucial distinc- tions between kinds of material agency are not acknowledged, presumably because to include them would compromise the decentering project. To rea- son so confuses decentering the human with its total erasure, an unrealistic and ultimately self-defeating enterprise, considering that the success of the decentering project depends precisely on persuading humans of its efficacy. The framework provided by an expanded idea of cognition can help ­offset these limitations (Hayles 2014). Traditionally, cognition has been identified with human consciousness and thought. This view is now under pressure from the emergence of cognitive biology, a scientific field that advances a much more capacious view of cognition, maintaining that all lifeforms have some cognitive capacity, even plants and microorganisms (Hayles 2016). In the area of human cognition, recent research in neurosci- ence, cognitive psychology, and other fields has revealed a level of neuronal processing inaccessible to consciousness but essential for consciousness to function. These processes include integrating somatic, chemical, and elec- tric signals to create a coherent body representation, discerning patterns too complex for consciousness to grasp, drawing inferences and creating anticipations from these patterns, and perhaps most importantly, processing information much faster than consciousness can and selecting which infor- mation to forward to conscious awareness. Although this level of neuronal processing goes by various names, I call it the cognitive nonconscious. The emphasis on nonconscious cognition participates in the central thrust of decentering the human, both because it recognizes another agent in addi- tion to consciousness/unconsciousness in cognitive processes2 and because it provides a bridge between human, animal, and technical cognitions, locat- ing them on a continuum rather than understanding them as qualitatively different capacities. In addition, nonconscious cognition encourages us to recognize distinctions between different kinds of material processes and correspondingly different kinds of agencies. In particular, it distinguishes between material forces that can adequately be treated through determinis- tic methods, forces that are nonlinear and far from equilibrium and hence unpredictable in their evolution, the subset of which is recursively struc- tured in such a way that life can emerge, and the yet smaller set of processes that lead to and directly support cognition. Agencies exist all along this The Cognitive Nonconscious 183 continuum, but the capacities and potentials of those agencies are not all the same and should not be treated as if they were interchangeable and equivalent. Finally, the nonconscious cognitive framework provides a coun- tervailing narrative to the Deleuzian concepts and vocabularies pervasive in the new materialisms, recognizing that forces, intensities, assemblages, and the rest are balanced in living systems with forces of cohesion, survival, and evolution. Without such correctives, the enthusiasm for all concepts Deleuzian threatens to ensnare some of the more extreme instances of new materialism in a self-enclosed discourse that, although it makes sense in its own terms, fails to connect convincingly with other knowledge practices and veers toward the ideological, in which practices are endorsed for their agree- ment with the Deleuzian view rather than because they adequately represent acts, practices, and events in the real world. Making this case requires careful consideration of the differences between various camps among the mew materialisms, along with a rigorous explo- ration of where and how a nonconscious cognitive framework adds con- structively to new materialist projects, where it differs from new materialist claims and provides useful correctives, and where it breaks new ground not considered by the new materialists. To facilitate the analysis, the argument will proceed according to concepts central to new materialisms, including ontology, evolution, survival, force, and transformation.

Ontology An outlier among new materialists, Karen Barad derives her brand of mate- rialism from the physics-philosophy of quantum mechanicist Niels Bohr. Faced with experimental evidence for the wave-particle duality in the 1920s, Bohr developed an interpretation distinctly different from that of Werner Heisenberg. As is well known, Heisenberg argued for the “interference” interpretation (the observer interferes with the experiment, which leads to the Uncertainty Principle, stating that the uncertainty in the momentum times the position cannot be less than a minute quantity calculated from Planck’s constant). Bohr, by contrast, thought that the issue was more com- plex. He pointed out that to perform a measurement, the experimenter has to decide on an experimental apparatus. Using a simplified set-up for clar- ity, Barad shows that the apparatus used to measure position is mutually exclusive from one measuring momentum, so the experimenter must choose between them. Consequently, as the apparatus measuring position achieves more precision, the measurement of momentum becomes correspondingly more uncertain, and vice versa. Bohr understood this situation as implying, not that the experimenter has “disturbed” the measurement, but rather that the position and momentum do not have determinate values until they are measured. As Barad points out, later experiments confirmed his intuition. For Bohr, this phenomenon remained in the realm of epistemology. The point for him was that interactions, which include the experimental apparatus 184 Hayles and the experimenter, form an inextricable unit determining how reality manifests itself and placing theoretical limits on what can be known. Making the leap into ontology, Barad’s strong contribution extends Bohr’s insight. She calls the measuring/measurer unit a “phenomenon,” explaining that “phenomena are specific material performances of the world” (Barad 2007, 335) and coining the term “intraaction” to designate them, “intra” empha- sizing that at least two agents must be involved, each bringing the other into existence simultaneously through their intraactions. Thus she answers one of philosophy’s first questions: why is there something rather than nothing? A universe without intraactions would in her view be a contradiction in terms, because without intraactions, the universe could not exist as such. In a course I co-taught with particle physicist Mark Kruse at Duke University, “Science Fiction, Science Fact,” focusing on quantum mechanics in science and fiction, we and the students worked through Barad’s book together. Mark is part of the team that recently discovered the Higgs boson, and I was interested in his reaction to Barad’s claims; as a scientist, he must necessarily believe that the experiments he and his colleagues conduct at CERN indicate something about reality. Of all the scientific fields, parti- cle physics (along with cosmology and cosmochemistry) comes closest to probing experimentally philosophy’s first question, although I doubt that anyone in the field would claim he has definitive answers. (When confront- ing this kind of issue, Mark was fond of saying, “That’s a philosophical question,” meaning that the question is not susceptible to experimental test- ing.) Nevertheless, particle physics now offers a scenario of the universe’s first nanoseconds after the Big Bang (a temporal regime called “inflation”), and it has postulated the mechanisms and curtailments of that stupendous event. No doubt with that background in mind, Mark commented that he thought Barad’s vision was both reasonable and consistent with empirical results of his field. Barad (2007), of course, does not terminate her analysis with quantum mechanics, extrapolating her notion of “agential realism” into discourses, cultural politics, and feminist theory to emphasize the crucial role of inter/ intraactions in those fields. Nevertheless, her careful explications of quan- tum mechanical theories and experiments provide the critical grounding for her project and lend it a certain cachet. She makes the point (not gener- ally recognized) that quantum mechanics applies to macroscopic as well as microscopic objects and that it is our most encompassing, most successful scientific theory to date.3 Her impressive expertise with quantum mechan- ics notwithstanding, a skeptical reader may well ask what differences are entailed when her analyses move from elementary particles to organisms, humans, and cultures. Even if the fundamental level of reality is intraac- tional, does that necessarily imply that cultures are? Here is where the framework of nonconscious cognition can contribute significantly, for the issue of levels is crucial to it. The specific dynamics operating at different levels provide a way to distinguish between material The Cognitive Nonconscious 185 processes and nonconscious cognition as an emergent result, as well as ­elucidating the modes of organization characteristic of consciousness/uncon- sciousness. The framework thus helps bridge the gap between quantum effects and cultural dynamics, filling in some of the connective tissue that Barad’s argument assumes must exist but that she does not explicitly discuss. In this respect she is not unlike most new materialists, for the issue of level- specific dynamics gets short shrift in their discourses, as does the empirical fact that these levels are characterized by different modes of organization. By making clear how some of these distinctions work, the framework of nonconscious cognition offers a useful corrective to new materialist theo- ries and claims. For example, nonconscious cognitive processes occur at a level of neuronal organization inaccessible to consciousness. To persist beyond about 500 ms, these processes require reinforcement from neurons with long axons involved in the production of consciousness (Kouider and Dehaene 2007; Dehaene 2009). Once this top-down reinforcement occurs, what follows is the “ignition of the global workspace,” as Stanislas Dehaene calls it, whereby reverberating circuits are activated and thoughts can per- sist indefinitely. The combination of bottom-up signals with top-down rein- forcement illustrates how important distinct levels are in neuronal processes in biological organisms. Similarly, scale-dependent phenomena are also found in technical cognitions of computational media, where bottom-up and top-down communications take place more or less continuously. To understand why new materialisms tend to gloss over levels, we may refer to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, which has been enormously influ- ential in the new materialisms. As Elizabeth Grosz (2011) observes in her explication of Deleuze, “Deleuze is primarily an ontologist, whose interest is in redynamizing our conception of the real” (55). Writing against the subject, the organism, and the sign, Deleuze in his own writings and those he co-authored with Guattari aims to create a vision that does not depend on those entities and embraces a vitality driven by affects, intensities, assem- blages, and lines of flight. He and Guattari acknowledge, of course, that subjects exist, but they highlight the forces that cut transversally across lev- els and thus do an end run around most of the concepts populating tradi- tional philosophy.

One side of a machinic assemblage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying par- ticles or pure intensities to circulate, and attributing to itself subjects that it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 4)

In the more extreme interpretations of Deleuze, some new materialists focus almost entirely on the “side facing a body without organs,” eradicating from 186 Hayles their narratives the necessary other side to the story, the forces of cohesion, encapsulation, and level-specific dynamics characteristic of living beings, as for example in Jussi Parikka’s (2010) characterization of insects as “machi- nological becomings” (129). As we will see in the following section, this leads either to contradictions, very partial accounts, or significant distor- tions of scientific practices, especially evolutionary biology. This extreme approach also makes nonconscious cognition, along with consciousness/ unconsciousness, almost impossible to imagine and certainly impossible to formulate as a formative force in contemporary culture.

Evolution One of the bolder attempts to apply Deleuzian principles is Luciana Parisi’s Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-Technology and the Mutations of Desire (2004). This project is noteworthy because, unlike most new materialisms, it creates a framework that recognizes and connects different levels of analy- ses, including evolutionary biology (the biophysical), sexual reproduction (the biocultural), and biotechnology (the biodigital). Intending to construct a counter-narrative to what she calls “Darwinism and neo-Darwinism,” Parisi focuses on Lynn Margulis’ theory of endosymbiosis, the process by which cells absorbed other freely living organisms in mutations estimated to have occurred 1.5 billion years ago. In this theory, eukaryotic cells (cells with a nucleus and organelles enclosed by a membrane) originated from commu- nities of interacting entities. The idea interests Parisi because she sees it as contesting a view in which natural selection works through heredity, thus privileging the repetition of the same. According to her, in the Darwinian paradigm heredity “crucially designates the economy of self-propagation of the genetic unit (the cause of all differences). Heredity confirms the auton- omy of genes from the environment … The environment within which the organism is born cannot re-programme the hereditary function of genetic material” (Parisi 2004, 49). This passage makes clear why she would see “Darwinism and neo-Darwinism” as the enemy, for inheritance in this view is a fundamentally conservative force, all the more so since natural selection is understood as a competitive contest for reproduction. To a large extent, the specter she battles is a paper tiger. This view of evolution may have held true for evolutionary biology in the 1940s, but recent work in epigenetics has shown that DNA is not the whole story of how genes are expressed. Crucially important is gene regulation, carried out by hormones and other chemical signals that regulate when and what genes are activated. These regulatory mechanisms, in turn, have been shown to be affected by environmental conditions (López-Maury, Marguerat, and Bähler 2008). Consequently, gene expression does not, as Parisi (2004) would have it, exclude “the feedback relations between environment and genes” (49). Moreover, her argument ignores the Baldwin effect, which traces a feed- back loop between mutations in species and the ways in which a species The Cognitive Nonconscious 187 modifies its environment to favor the mutation, another means by which the ­environment is connected to evolutionary developments. In addition, the Darwinian paradigm assumes that every species is attuned to the possibilities and challenges offered by its ecological niche, defined by its relation to other species and the dynamics of the surrounding habitat. It is simply incorrect, then, to assert as she does that “the environment [in neo-Darwinism] is des- tined to die as an irrelevant, inert and passive context of development” (49). Why focus on endosymbiosis? The theory appeals partly because of its displacement of “the zoocentrism of the theories of evolution (the priority of Homo sapiens)” (Parisi 2004, 62); in addition, it emphasizes assimilation and “networking” (Margulis and Sagan) rather than a competitive strug- gle to survive. To position this theory as opposed to “Darwinism and neo- Darwinism,” however, misses the point that assimilation and networking are themselves evolutionary survival strategies, particularly if one accepts (as Parisi does) that anaerobic bacteria merged with respiring bacteria as a survival strategy when the earth’s atmosphere began to change and the oxygen level rose (63). These flaws notwithstanding, Parisi’s (2004) vision works well at the level of endosymbiosis and leads to novel views of “abstract sex,” by which she means an analysis that “starts from the molecular dynamics of the organi- zation of matter to investigate the connection between genetic engineering and artificial nature, bacterial sex and feminine desire that define the notion of a virtual body-sex” (10). If this seems difficult to understand, she offers this clarification, in a passage that makes clear her Deleuzian orientation. “Primarily sex is an event: the actualization of modes of communication and reproduction of information that unleashes an indeterminate capacity to affect all levels of organization of a body—biological, cultural, economical and technological … Far from determining identity, sex is an envelope that folds and unfolds the most indifferent elements, substances, forms and func- tions of connection and transmission” (Parisi 2004, 11). The vision of sex as a force that cannot be confined to a subject (whether human or animal) and that permeates life (and nonlife) at all levels, down to and including the molecular, is a compelling insight when applied at the level of bacteria and the functions of assimilation, division, nutrition, and reproduction they carry out. The vision works less well as Parisi (2004) moves to her other two levels, the biocultural and biodigital. The problem here is not so much that her analysis is incorrect as that it operates almost entirely within a Deleuzian perspective, making it difficult to connect her comments with other well- developed discourses in biotechnology, digital media, information, and cul- tural studies. For example, in the section “Organic Capital,” she writes:

With industrial capitalism, reproducibility becomes abstracted from the socio-organic strata through a new organization of biophysical forms of content and expression aiming to subject and regulate masses 188 Hayles of decoded bodies (substances of content and expression). Industrial ­capitalism involves a reterritorialization of decodified socio-organic modes of reproduction (nucleic and cytoplasmic) bringing their sparse codes to the rhythms of mechanical reproduction. (Parisi 2004, 103)

The objects of her critique here, including genetic engineering, assisted reproductive techniques such as in vitro fertilization, human and nonhu- man cloning, and so forth, are all brought within the purview of “industrial capitalism,” without much specificity about what techniques are involved, what the problems are, and exactly how her analysis works to solve them, other than by discursively opening pre-conceived/pre-existing entities to the forces of Deleuzian deterritorialization. It is not surprising that her analysis works best at the level of bacteria and cells, for here there is no consciousness to complicate the struggle for survival. Surrounded by a permeable membrane defining an inner and outer environment, a unicellular organism interacts with its milieu in ways quali- tatively different from more complex organisms, including very short time- lines for reproduction and relatively rapid rates of mutation. Its potential for transformation is correspondingly greater, so to speak of its responses as sensitivities to “intensities” and of the cell as a mutating “assemblage” indeed captures some of its significant aspects. As organisms become more complex, cellular dynamics are integrated with many other levels and modes of organization, and the countervailing forces to Deleuzian deterritorializa- tion become correspondingly stronger. Consequently, Parisi must fall back almost exclusively on Deleuzian vocabulary and concepts at the biocultural­ and biodigital levels, creating a kind of self-enclosed discursive bubble ­unable to create meaningful links with actual practices in the world. A mid-level example of bio-lifeforms more complex than single cells but still much simpler than mammals are insects, which may therefore pose an interesting case for how far the Deleuzian dynamics of flow, metamorpho- sis, and deterritorialization can apply in convincing and persuasive ways. Insects are like unicellular organisms in being devoid of consciousness; like cells, they also have relatively short timelines to reproduce and greater frequencies of mutations (the reason, of course, that fruit flies have been favorites of experimenters for decades). Jussi Parikka has applied Deleuzian ideas to insects, including to the interesting case of insect swarms, where nonconscious cognition emerges as the potential for collective action increases through chemical signaling and other non-semantic modes of communication. Referring to Von Frisch’s pioneering work on bee communication, Parikka (2010) argues they are

not representational entities but machinological becomings, to be con- textualized in terms of their capabilities of perceiving and grasping the The Cognitive Nonconscious 189 environmental fluctuations as part of their organizational structures … where the intelligence of the interaction is not located in any one bee, or even a collective of bees as a stable unit, but in the ‘in-between’ space of becoming: bees relating to the mattering milieu, which becomes articu- lated as a continuum to the social behavior of the insect community. This community is not based on representational content, then, but on distributed organization of the society of nonhuman actors. (129)

The denial of representation is striking, especially in light of the so-called “waggle” bee dance, where the orientation of the bee, the energy it puts forth, and the direction of the dance all communicate precise informa- tion about food sources. Why does this not constitute representation, in Parikka’s view? It seems that the primary reason is to maintain faithfulness to the Deleuzian paradigm, even when the facts indicate otherwise. Evoked instead is the continuum between the bees and their milieu, intensities as forces that precede and displace the individual, and contingent assemblages. While this vocabulary and set of concepts works well to characterize certain aspects of the behaviors of social insects, it underplays the possibilities for nonconscious cognition and representational actions, an erasure that the framework of nonconscious cognition would help correct. This raises the important question whether a middle ground may be forged between Deleuzian becomings and cognition, subjectivity, and higher consciousness. On the one hand, a purist may object that such a middle ground is impossible, because the privilege of origin must be located either with forces and intensities, from which everything else derives (the Deleuzian view), or with the individual subject as a pre-existing entity upon which forces operate. In this view, both cannot have priority simultaneously, and the choice of one or the other entails complex chains of consequences that amount to different worldviews. Suppose, however, that we position them not as contraries forcing an either/or choice but as two different perspectives on an integrated whole (as Deleuze and Guattari seem to suggest in identify- ing two sides to an assemblage), each with its own truths and insights. In this case, an analogy may be drawn between this situation and the particle/wave duality that Barad discusses. In this analogy, the particle, located as a point mass in space, corresponds to an entity, while wave action, propagating in a non-localized manner for a temporal duration, resembles an event. If we ask whether entities or events are primary, from Barad’s perspective we are asking the wrong question. Rather we should inquire where are the points of intraaction, the dynamic and continuing interplays between material pro- cesses and the structured, organized patterns characteristic of consciousness. Mediating between material processes and modes of awareness, noncon- scious cognition provides a crucial site where intraactions connect sensory input from the internal and external environments (“events”) with the emer- gence of the subject (“entities”). In this view, the nonconscious cognitive 190 Hayles framework is positioned not as anti- or pro-Deleuzian but as the mediat- ing bridge between the two perspectives. Among the theorists who have attempted to adopt a similar mediating position (although not in terms of nonconscious cognition) are Elizabeth Grosz and Rosi Braidotti. While both strike some kind of balance between forces/intensities and subjects/organ- isms, each has her specific way of doing so, along with a distinctive rheto- ric and mode of reasoning. We may compare their approaches through the crucial issue of survival, and in this context further explicate the role that nonconscious cognition plays.

Survival In her elegant discussion of Darwin, Elizabeth Grosz (2011) seeks to align him both with Bergson and Deleuze. Specifically what she sees in Darwin that contributes to her project of decentering the human is his insistence on the continuum of humans with animals and all of life through evolutionary processes, making the differences between humans and nonhuman animals a matter of degree, not an absolute separation. If the human characteristic of language, for example, is already present in other animals to a lesser degree, then a small step leads to Deleuze’s view of life as “the ongoing tendency to actualize the virtual, to make tendencies and potentialities real, to explore organs and activities so as to facilitate and maximize the actions they make possible” (Grosz 2011, 20). Of course, something has to be erased from Darwin to bring about this rapprochement, specifically his assumption that natural selection works on and through the organism (as well as groups of individuals), whereas for Deleuze the organism is what emerges sometimes in metastabilities subject to constant dynamic rearrangements. In part Grosz (2011) sidesteps the organism as the focal point for natural selection through her emphasis on sexual selection. Claiming that sexual selection cannot be reduced to natural selection (as some evolutionary biolo- gists seek to do), she aligns sexual selection with the “force of bodily inten- sification, its capacity to arouse pleasure or ‘desire,’ its capacity to generate sensation” (118). This is tied in with an emphasis she sees in Darwin of “the nonadaptive, nonreductive, nonstrategic investment of (most) forms of life in sexual difference and thus sexual selection” (119). Of course, a skep- tic can point out that sexual selection is tied to natural selection through competition for mates and thus ultimately for reproductive success, a point Grosz acknowledges but insists cannot be the whole story (120). Indeed, if we think of the peacock’s tail and other such extravagances, it is difficult to see what fitness this might signal. Rather, the reasons that peahens prefer one peacock instead of another seem to have very little to do with reproduc- tive fitness and a great deal to do with pleasure, desire, and sensation, just as Grosz argues. What can the framework of nonconscious cognition add? The implicit conflict between the Darwinian organism and the Deleuzian flow becomes The Cognitive Nonconscious 191 most apparent in Grosz’s essay, “A Politics of Imperceptibility” (2002). Arguing against identity politics as a feminist strategy, she points out that even an identity acknowledged to be heterogeneous and fractured still assumes that identity will be replicated over time, thus leading to a repeti- tion of the same. For real change to be possible, Grosz argues, one needs a different theoretical orientation, one that emphasizes transformations and openness to constant changes and deterritorializations—namely, the Deleuzian paradigm. Still, it is difficult to see how political agency can be mobilized without some references to subjects, organisms, and signs, the entities that Deleuze writes against.4 Nonconscious cognition provides a means by which agency can be located in material processes and in nonconscious cognition as their emergent result, without implying the allegedly stultifying effects of a consciousness unable to transform in relation to its environment (Damasio 2000).5 “It is a useful fiction to imagine that we as subjects are masters or agents of these very forces that constitute us as subjects, but misleading,” writes Grosz (2002, 471). Nonconscious cognition is the link connecting material forces to us as subjects, thus serving to deconstruct the illusion of subjects as “masters … of the very forces that constitute us” without requiring that subjects be alto- gether erased or ignored as agents capable of political actions. Notwithstanding the sometimes strained quality of Grosz’s argument here, imperceptibility has been given a new purchase on the political by the recent revelations of spying by the NSA and the associated tracking and data collecting of social media, search engines, and the like. Many are now taking down their Facebook pages and trying to erase their presences on the web, so imperceptibility has come to seem a desirable position to occupy. In 2006 Rosi Braidotti anticipated this trend in extending Grosz’s argument (while also modifying it) in her focus on “The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible.” Unlike many new materialists, Braidotti acknowledges subjects, with an emphasis on the “sustainable subject” (135). “This subject is physiologically embedded in the corporeal materiality of the self, but the enfleshed inten- sive or nomadic subject is an in-between: a folding-in of external influences and a simultaneous unfolding-out of affects” (135). Obviously influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, Braidotti in The Posthuman (2013) nevertheless declares, “I am very independent in relation to them” (66). Her independence can be seen in how she conceives the sustainable sub- ject: “Sustainability is about how much of it a subject can take and ethics is accordingly redefined as the geometry of how much bodies are capable of” (Braidotti 2006, 136). By “how much of it a subject can take,” she means how much a subject can open itself to the “forces, or flows, intensi- ties and passions that solidify—in space—and consolidate—in time—within the singular configuration commonly know as an ‘individual’ (or rather: di-vidual) self” (136). Her balancing act, then, is to conceive of the subject as an entity open to events, up to a threshold that marks where the subject would disintegrate altogether: “our bodies will thus tell us if and when we 192 Hayles have reached a threshold or a limit” (137). Balancing on this threshold, the subject in her discourse sometimes sounds like a stable entity, and at other times, like a momentary assemblage about to disintegrate (note the hesita- tion above between the “individual” and the Deleuzian “di-vidual”). The same balancing act is evident in this passage: the subject is an “intensive and dynamic entity … [that is] a portion of forces that is stable enough— spatio-temporally speaking—to sustain and to undergo constant fluxes of transformation” (136). Ethics, then, “consists in re-working the pain into threshold of sustainability,” a determination to take the coherent self as far into the flux as possible while still maintain its integrity as a self: “cracking, but holding it, still” (139). By calling this the “sustainable” subject, Braidotti (2006) of course implies that survival is a paramount concern. Yet we know that all “indi- viduals” (and even “di-viduals”) must die. The apparent conflict between death and sustainability is negotiated in her discourse by arguing that death applies only to the individual. Acknowledging that “self-preservation is a commonly shared concern” and that “self-preservation of the self is such a strong drive that destruction can only come from the outside,” she neverthe- less urges that we see death as “the extreme form of my power to become other or something else” (Braidotti 2006, 146), for example, the molecules that survive the body’s decay, or if not molecules (many proteins do not survive the death of the individual), then the atoms that persist in and as the worms that have their fill. Surely the only creatures that can reason so, however, are humans; virtu- ally all other life forms will struggle to live as long as they can, a sign that they are never reconciled to death. Even as the gazelle feels the lioness’ claws in her back, she still desperately kicks to get away. In this sense, Braidotti (2006) re-installs human privilege in the face of death. Although she argues that her framework “implies approaching the world through affectivity and not cognition” (139), surely only cognition can achieve the rapprochement with death that she recommends. One wonders, then, why she introduces the idea at all. I conjecture she requires it to achieve a resolution to the conflict between her insistence that the subject is sustainable and her com- mitment to the Deleuzian paradigm. It is, so to speak, the price of sustaining the balance: the individual disappears but reappears in the Deleuzian flows and intensities with which we are nevertheless urged to identify as somehow another form of “us.” For the positions Grosz and Braidotti articulate, nonconscious cogni- tion offers another interpretive option, a site in which subjects can emerge without implying they are immune to flows and intensities (Grosz’s con- cern), and without requiring that the living human subject should balance at the threshold of disintegration without exceeding it (Braidotti’s emphasis). Moreover, there is considerable empirical evidence that the kind of neu- rological structure giving rise to nonconscious cognition actually exists in many mammals, including, but not confined to, humans. The Cognitive Nonconscious 193 The issue of whether a discursive or ideological position has ­empirical support is, of course, complex, since the chains of reasoning involved in arriving at such conclusions are necessarily permeated with numerous assumptions about what constitutes evidence, what standards of confirma- tion are entailed, etc. Nevertheless, in my view a position that can claim empirical support is preferable to one that cannot; otherwise, as Bruno Latour has pointed out, it is impossible to distinguish between what is actu- ally the case and what is ideologically driven fantasy. Not surprisingly, the Deleuzian paradigm does not place much (if any) emphasis on empiri- cal verification, preferring to talk about “royal sciences.” These, accord- ing to Deleuze and Guattari (2004), are concerned with the discovery of abstract laws and general principles, in contrast to the “minor sciences,” concerned with heterogeneous materials and craft-like approaches to flow and other phenomena difficult to mathematicize (398–413, especially 413). Nonconscious cognition subverts this distinction, because it is inherently difficult to measure and yet has strong empirical confirmation from a range of experiments (see Lewicki, Hill, and Czyzewka 1992). Bridging the gap between the mainstream “royal” and marginalized “minor,” it challenges the belief that most human behavior is directed by consciousness, with- out requiring that we accept the ideologically­ laden assumption that the “minor” or marginal is inherently superior to the “royal” or major.

Force “Force” is often invoked in the Deleuzian paradigm, but seldom is this des- ignation made more specific or precise. In this worldview force is an essen- tial concept, for if subjects are absent, agency must be located somewhere, and “force” becomes a kind of agentless agent, the driving desire that brings about and also participates in “agencement” (usually translated as “assem- blage,” a noun perpetually at risk of losing the Deleuzian emphasis on the eventful). Grosz (2002), for example, writes of the “play of the multiplicity of active and reactive forces that have no agency, or are all that agency and identity consist in. Which is to say, force needs to be understood in its full sub-human and super-human resonances: as the inhuman … which both makes the human possible and which at the same time positions the human within a world where force works in spite of and around the human, within and as the human” (467). The eloquence of this passage notwithstanding, it remains extremely imprecise about the nature of “force” and fails to distinguish between dif- ferent kinds of forces, although these kinds of distinction have been exten- sively investigated in various scientific fields. On the atomic and molecular levels that Parisi (2004) invokes, for example, four fundamental forces are recognized: strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravity. In chemistry, other kinds of forces come into play in solutions and suspensions, lead- ing to the possibility for self-organizing dynamics to come into play for 194 Hayles far-from-equilibrium systems. Parisi often invokes this language, but also fails to notice the importance of systems at equilibrium, whose dynamics can be described by linear differential equations. A great deal is known about when a system’s behaviors can be accurately predicted by such equa- tions (shooting a rocket to the moon, for example, or braking a car under specified weather conditions). The privilege that Parisi and others accord to nonlinear dynamics is often associated with unpredictability, and hence implicitly with the alleged inability of science to deal adequately with such systems. This ignores the important new field of simulation science, where chaotic and complex sys- tems are modeled and yield reliable knowledge about how such systems will behave (Parikka is atypical in his interest in computer simulations on insect swarms and other swarming and schooling behaviors). Moreover, the vagueness of “force” elides an issue that ought to be crucial to the new materialisms: the differences between material forces whose actions are deterministic and hence can be calculated precisely as the sum of the rel- evant forces, and those that involve self-organizing, chaotic, and complex dynamics and whose actions can lead to the emergence of increasingly com- plex outcomes, including life and cognition. Among this group, there is also a crucial distinction between systems that are adaptive and those that are not. Both the BZ reaction in chemistry and bacteria’s endosymbiosis history are examples of self-organizing systems, but the bacteria are adaptive and can change when conditions change, whereas the BZ reaction, although unpredictable in the various visual displays it creates, cannot adapt in the same way. In attributing agency to nonhuman forces, these kinds of distinctions are critical. A rock thrown against a window, for example, can be said to act as an agent when it breaks the glass; in this case, its trajectory and force are entirely deterministic and can be calculated precisely if the relevant factors are know. A different kind of agency is exhibited by an avalanche, capable of killing humans and other lifeforms and releasing energies on an awesome scale. Unlike the thrown rock, it involves criticality thresholds, which means that it may be difficult or impossible to predict exactly when it will take place. Nevertheless, the agency here is not intentional or mysterious; if all of the relevant factors are known, it can be modeled so as to arrive at a reason- able estimate of how it will behave (the same can be said of earthquakes, where models can predict likely sites for earthquakes and a rough estimate of the span during which they are likely to happen, although the models are not good enough to predict exactly when). Yet other cases are the agencies of systems capable of self-organizing dynamics; here, truly surprising results may emerge, the pre-eminent example of which is the emergence of life mil- lions of years ago in the planet’s history. All of these may be said to dem- onstrate the agency of material processes and the importance of nonhuman forces, but such generalizations are vapid without more precision about the kinds of dynamics and structures involved. The Cognitive Nonconscious 195 Why keep “force” so vague, then, when so much is known about different kinds of forces and the different agencies they embody? As soon as agency is discussed in the terms indicated above, the mysterious effects of “force” driving the Deleuzian paradigm evaporate into a collection of known agen- cies. Even when different kinds of agencies are acknowledged, there is a tendency to privilege those that lead to complexity and self-organization (evident in Parisi, for example), valuing the nonlinear over the linear, and the far-from-equilibrium over systems at equilibrium, presumably because these are the forces that lead to novel and unexpected results. Yet these same nonlinear systems are the ones from which life emerged. One might logically suspect, then, that embedded in these preferences is an implicit trajectory that would privilege the living over the nonliving, the complex and adaptive over the simple and deterministic. This result is forbidden, however, by the overall aim of decentering the human and celebrating the nonliving as fully capable of agency. Without further specification about the different kinds of agencies and forces, this contradiction indicates that the preference for one kind of force over another is an ideological choice, not an empirical conclusion. The framework of nonconscious cognition differs from the majority of new materialisms by being explicit about structures, dynamics, and organ- izations (i.e., “forces”) at multiple levels across the human, animal, and technological spectrum. Implicit in the framework is an emphasis on cogni- tion in general, and thus a belief that cognition is important and worthy of study. Indeed, in arguing for nonconscious cognition, the framework aims to increase the kinds of acts that are seen as cognitive, especially those in which consciousness is not involved. In this sense, then, it can be said to enlarge the realm of the cognitive as a special kind of capability that emerges from, and yet is distinct from, the material processes that underlie it. To explore further what this kind of approach has to offer, I turn now to trans- formation, another topic crucial to new materialists’ discourses.

Transformation Transformation is typically highly valued in new materialists’ discourses, for a variety of reasons: the hope for constructive changes within the politi- cal scene (Grosz 2002 and 2001, Braidotti 2006 and 2013); a kinder, more eco-friendly world not centered around humans (Parisi 2004, Shukin 2009, Bennett 2010); and the possibility of opening up productive changes within humans themselves (Braidotti 2006 and 2013, Parikka 2010). These are important and significant goals, and the idea of locating agency within material processes is an intriguing possibility, especially given the desirabil- ity of locating agency other than in human actors. Nevertheless, the largest transformative forces on the planet today are undoubtedly human agency and human interventions, the effects of which are being registered in climate change, the worldwide loss of habitat for nonhuman animals, the idea of the 196 Hayles Anthropocene, and in the reality that human actions are unleashing forces far beyond our ability to control them. It would seem, then, that a discussion of transformation must necessarily involve recognition of human agencies and the recent exponential growth of nonconscious cognition in technical objects. Jane Bennett, arguably less indebted to Deleuze than some other new materialists (although she men- tions him and uses some Deleuzian vocabulary), recognizes the interpen- etration of technics and humans in her references to Bernard Stiegler. As I have argued elsewhere (Hayles 2012), this interpenetration applies not only to the dawn of the human species in the Pleistocene era but also in the pre- sent, especially in the deep technological infrastructure affecting everything from human directional navigation to the neurological structures activated by reading on the web. Bennett (2010) makes an important point with regard to this interpene- tration: namely the implication that human agency is always distributed, not only within the body between consciousness and nonconscious faculties, but also between the body and the environment. Her examples include edible matter (affecting the body through nutrition), minerals (through bone forma- tion, for example), and worms (whose “small agencies” (Bennett 2010, 96) can be seen in the transformation of forest into savannah as recent research has shown, an example not mentioned specifically by Bennett). Allowing herself the speculation that the “typical American diet” may have played a role in “engendering the widespread susceptibility to the propaganda lead- ing up to the invasion of Iraq” (107), she clearly wants to make connections across multiple levels of analysis, but her focus on material processes makes such an idea almost impossible to document or even to explore. Adding nonconscious cognition into the picture, especially in relation to drones, unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs), and other technical devices, would help bridge the chasm that currently yawns between her examples and her speculations. In conclusion, a robust account of material processes should not be the end point of analysis but rather an essential component of a multi-level approach that ranges from the inorganic to the organic, the nonhuman to the human, the nonconscious with consciousness. While many new mate- rialists might argue that far too much consideration has been given to the “entity” side of these intraactions, resulting in a devaluation of material pro- cesses, dwelling entirely on the “event” side fails to capture essential char- acteristics of the living, especially the ability of living organisms to endure through time, construct as well as interact/intraact with their environments, and deploy agencies that are not merely emergent but also intentional, even when nonconscious. While it is likely that no one approach can do all this, nonconscious cognition can supply essential components presently absent from most new materialists’ analyses. Politically, nonconscious cognition grants to a technological object the privilege of what amounts to a worldview, thus linking its behaviors to The Cognitive Nonconscious 197 the nature of the sensors and actuators that together constitute and define its capabilities. While living organisms (with a few exceptions) must be understood retroactively (for example, by reverse engineering the evo- lutionary processes), technical objects have been made. Leaving aside emergent results (a special case that requires careful orchestration to suc- ceed), each technical object has a set of design specifications determining how it will behave. When objects join in networks and interact/intraact with human partners, the potential for surprises and unexpected results increases exponentially. The Deleuzian paradigm contributes an enhanced appreciation for nonliv- ing technical objects to generate surprises, new potentialities, and mutating assemblages. The nonconscious cognitive framework supplies a non-reduc- tive empirical approach that enlists the cognitive powers of humans, along with a precise analysis of the structures and organizations involved, while also insisting that nonhumans have cognitive powers of their own. This is not exactly new materialism, vibrant materiality, imperceptibility, or nomadic subjectivity, but rather a paradigm that, cognizant of scientific and technical knowledges, nevertheless strives to bring about a transformation of traditional views of the place of the human in the world.

Notes 1 By “material” I mean matter, energy, and information, not only matter in the narrow sense. 2 In my understanding, consciousness and the unconscious are grouped together as “modes of awareness.” In the so-called “new” unconscious (Hassin, Uleman, and Bargh 2006), the unconscious is understood as a kind of broad environ- mental scanning, for example, what happens when one is driving toward work and thinking of the presentation one will make upon arrival and a car suddenly brakes ahead. Instantly one snaps to attention and takes appropriate action. This illustrates the kind of easy and continuous communication between con- sciousness and the (new) unconscious. In this view, the Freudian unconscious is a special subset in which some kind of trauma has intervened to disrupt the communication with consciousness. Nevertheless, the Freudian unconscious still communicates through dreams and symptoms to the conscious mind. By contrast, nonconscious cognition is inherently inaccessible to consciousness; no amount of introspection will reveal its mechanisms to conscious thought. Nevertheless, it has the capability either to forward information to consciousness, or equally important, of suppressing it if it is not relevant to a given context. 3 Whether quantum mechanics can or should be applied to macroscopic objects is a moot point. In the “Science Fiction, Science Fact” class we discussed the quan- tum effects of a speeding tennis ball. Mark supplied calculations showing that the de Broglie wavelength (a measure of the ball’s wave properties) is on the order of 10–32 meters. By comparison, the radius of an atom is 10–10 meters, and of a proton, 10–15 meters. Not only is 10–32 meters a completely immeasurable quan- tity, but as Mark explained in an email (July 24, 2014), it does not even make physical sense since measuring distance to that precision is not possible because of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. 4 Typical in the renunciation of subjects and signification is this passage from Deleuze and Guattari (2004) in A Thousand Plateaus: “We are no more ­familiar 198 Hayles with scientificity than we are with ideology; all we know are assemblages. And the only assemblages are machinic assemblages of desire and collective enun- ciation. No signifiance, no subjectification: writing to the nth power (all indi- viduated enunciation remains trapped within the dominant significations, all signifying desire is associated with dominated subjects) (32). 5 Antonio Damasio (2000), for example, posits the proto-self (in my terms, non- conscious cognition) as crucial for consciousness (174), yet also argues that “there is no self without awareness of and engagement with others” (194).

Works Cited Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. “The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible,” in Deleuze and Philosophy, edited by Constantin V. Boundas, 133–59. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Damasio, Antonio. 2000. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Mariner Books. Dehaene, Stanislas. 2009. “Conscious and Nonconscious Processes: Distinct Forms of Evidence Accumulation?,” Séminaire Poincaré XII: 89–114. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. New York: Continuum. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2002. “A Politics of Imperceptibility: A Response to ‘Anti-Racism, Multiculturalism and the Ethics of Identification,’” Philosophy of Social Criticism 28: 463–72. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2011. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hassin, Ran R., James S. Uleman, and John A. Bargh. 2006. The New Unconscious. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2012. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2014. “Cognition Everywhere: The Rise of the Cognitive Nonconscious and the Costs of Consciousness.” New Literary History 45.2: 199–220. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2017. Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago. Kouider, Sid and Stanislas Dehaene. 2007. “Levels of Processing During Non- conscious Perception: A Critical Review of Visual Masking.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 362 (1481): 857–75. Lewicki, Pawel, Thomas Hill, and Maria Czyzewska. 1992. “Nonconscious Acquisition of Information,” American Psychology 47.6 (June): 796–801. López-Maury, Luis, Samuel Marguerat, and Jürg Bähler. 2008. “Tuning Gene Expression to Changing Environments: From Rapid Responses to Evolutionary Adaptation.” Nature Reviews Genetics 9.8: 583–93. Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagen. 2003. Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species. New York: Basic Books. The Cognitive Nonconscious 199 Parikka, Jussi. 2010. Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Parisi, Luciana. 2004. Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-Technology and the Mutations of Desire. London: Continuum. Rappaport, R. A. (1967). Ritual regulation of environmental relations among a New Guinea people. Ethnology 6(1), 17–30. Rappaport, R. A. (1968). Pigs for the Ancestors. New York: Free Press. Shukin, Nicole. 2009. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 9 Scale Variance and the Concept of Matter

Derek Woods Rice University

One fundamental stake of the new materialism is the critique of reduction, or the notion that all phenomena can ultimately be explained by determinate mechanisms. Some interest in emergence and self-organization, vitalism, and the active properties of matter is a constant across the varied arguments about what would make this materialism new.1 Yet these welcome develop- ments have the potential to undermine themselves through their reliance on matter as a fundamental concept. What is matter when theorists use it as subject of action and predication? Since this question carries us into realms of physics that do not reveal a singular stuff, but rather ever-stranger objects of knowledge such as superstrings, hadrons, and dark matter, it seems inev- itable that theories will use philosophical concepts of matter rather than physical ones. If they do use physical ones, “matter” will divide into more specific concepts and formalisms which may or may not be helpful for a new materialism. If they use a philosophical one, they will draw on the history of materialism in a way that has a tendency towards monism even when mon- ism is not argued explicitly.2 Written as a substance rather than simply a provisional genre that includes diverse particles and forces, matter becomes the underlying identity from which specific entities differentiate. When this is the case, new materialism risks reiterating the same reductionism that it consistently works to avoid, privileging matter as the foundational scale or substance. In this chapter, I attempt to contribute to new materialism by opening it to evidence from the natural sciences that it has not yet addressed, evidence of scale variance that invites an interpretation incompatible with monism. Scale variance names the observation that things happen differently at dif- ferent scales due to constraints upon becoming. Extracted and abstracted from evidence produced by multiple fields, scale variance can be used as a theoretical concept in the human sciences. This concept suggests that the concept “matter” now functions as a stopgap measure for the new mate- rialism, one that can be replaced (probably in many ways) by a pluralist ontology that includes at least two (1+n) scale domains. If I question the usefulness of the concept of matter in a productive “materialist” conversa- tion, however, this is not an argument in favor of idealism or the separation of social and psychological phenomena from material ones. This question Scale Variance and the Concept of Matter 201 comes from an engagement with new materialist theory that seeks, as Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman put it, “to rethink materiality, the very ‘stuff’ of bodies and natures” (2008, 6). Yet in a naturalist context in which we accept nothing is finally immaterial or supernatural, including thought and communication, perhaps the concept of matter becomes unnecessary and depends too much on its history of opposition to the immaterial. Rethinking materiality invites an approach to the sciences with a lower case s that sees ontology with a lower case o as a writing practice that experiments with new distinctions. Emphasis on scale variance yields a very different picture of reality from that apparent in much canonical art about growing and shrinking. In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Brobdingnagians are humans scaled up and Lilliputians are humans scaled down. In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the mushrooms Alice eats in order to change size do not also change her form: she telescopes smoothly from one size to another. In Charles and Ray Eames’ film Powers of Ten, the viewer takes a visual jour- ney from the scale of quarks to the scale of the visible universe—all with the smoothness of a simple zoom lens. The Inner Life of a Cell, a recent anima- tion produced by a Harvard biology lab, reinscribes linear point perspective in a microscopic space where it would be optically unavailable. We find the same pattern across a large number of texts. Writers and artists often imag- ine changes of scale as a smooth and continuous zoom. Scale variance gives an opposite picture of reality. Different from carto- graphic scale, the concept refers to jumps and discontinuities, so that any smooth scaling would encounter qualitative differences. Critic Timothy Clark uses the term “scale effects” to characterize what I call scale variance. For Clark, cartographic scale is inadequate: “non-cartographic concepts of scale are not a smooth zooming in and out but involve jumps and disconti- nuities” (2012, 149).3 In this respect, scale variance depends on difference and amounts to more than a question of measurement: you need at least two scales to get started. Scholars have not yet discussed the relationship between scale variance and materialism, old or new. Thus the second section of this essay shows how an analysis grounded in scale variance gives us a new perspective on the work of Karen Barad (2007) and Manuel DeLanda (2002 and 2006). The notion that quantum effects such as entanglement are entirely scalable—that they still matter at “macro” scales above the sub-atomic—is crucial to Barad’s ontology or “onto-epistemology.” For DeLanda, individuals of the “same ontological status” exist at multiple scales, so that organism, species, and society are all concrete individuals in the same sense (2002, 147). Barad and DeLanda are representative enough for the claim that where scale is addressed in the new materialism the emphasis is, so far, on scale invariance. Philosopher of science Mariam Thalos (2013) addresses the relationship between emergence and scale variance in Without Hierarchy: The Scale Freedom of the Universe. Her work is not yet in dialogue with the new materialisms or realisms, but it is relevant to non-reductionist arguments 202 Woods about materiality. Thalos puts forward a metaphysics of the relations among scales that allows no one scale to become the ontological bedrock for the others—scale freedom, for her, means freedom from the notion that any single scale is the master scale (scale free is a confusing term here, since it elsewhere refers to cases of scale invariance such as scale free networks—but Thalos’ meaning is the opposite). In the final section below, she helps me develop an alternative to emergentism based on the notion that there is irreducible activity at every scale. For her, however, scale freedom is still consistent with a materialist monism. By contrast, I argue that the critique of emergence also applies to a monist materialist approach to scale variance, which means, again, that matter may not be the best concept for what the new materialism works to address. While work on scale exists in multiple fields, it is highly varied with respect to method and motivation. As a result, there is no single obvious starting point for the study of scale, but this adds to the topic’s interest and suggests that it could become a field in its own right. In the natural sci- ences, the literature is spread among geography, ecology, biology, physics, and other fields—spread too far for a comprehensive review. In a similar way, work on scale in the human sciences lacks the unity that exists for topics such as environmental history or postcolonial studies. The history of science addresses microscopes and other visual (or aural) media used for the observation of very small and very large things.4 Philosophy of sci- ence discusses scale in debates over reductionism and emergence, debates related to the Vienna school picture of science as a stack of “levels” that divide the “unity of nature” into physics, biology, and other fields—a pic- ture that corresponds to scale differences and often enshrines physics as the master science.5 In literary and cultural studies, scale emerges in stud- ies of globalization, colonialism, and aesthetics, from discussions of the sublime to recent work on representations of molecules and other micro phenomena in art.6 In environmental studies, scale has become an impor- tant topic in discussions of climate change and the “Anthropocene”—the present geological epoch in which the human species acts as a geophysical force.7 As an object of knowledge, then, scale has no proper discipline. No discipline has special authority over the topic in the way that, for exam- ple, physics has institutional authority to speak of neutrons or biology of membranes.8

Some Versions of Scale Variance Examples of scale variance exist across the natural sciences, engineering, economics, and geography. Though the central examples below come from biology and ecology, I mention physics and engineering to stress that scale variance spans distinctions such as organic/inorganic and nature/artifice— which is not to say that it renders these distinctions invalid, but that scale variance is at work, for example, in both the world of organisms and the Scale Variance and the Concept of Matter 203 world of technology. In physics, the classical example is the debate over the scalar limits of quantum mechanics: the scales at which quantum effects matter and those at which, as Paul Davies (1989) puts it, they “dissipate into the macroscopic environment” (xvi). The problem of quantum gravity names efforts to unify quantum theory, which describes very small phenom- ena, with the theory of general relativity, which describes very large objects and their gravitational fields.9 Engineers must often alter designs if they wish to dramatically shrink or enlarge them. Technologies pass thresholds of size across which they will no longer hold together and function. In a beautiful essay on the “Entomic Age,” Devin Fore discusses insect-inspired designs used by nanotechnolo- gists. Insect bodies evidently scale down better—they don’t have as far to go—than “the mechanical components developed in the industrial age on analogy with the muscular and circulatory systems of larger vertebrates— conveyer belts, piping, gear drives, derrick cranes, and so on” (2008, 42). At the nanoscale, engineers must replace these with “quantum mechanisms that are engineered in accordance with different structural principles.” Since the Newtonian principles governing mesoscopic masses such as human bodies break down at such scales, “the tectonics of the insect body offer a persuasive and practicable template.” No longer extensions of the human body, some technologies are designed by analogy with more appropriate scale domains (about which more below). By contrast, scale invariance names phenomena such as the Mandelbrot set, which describes self-similar patterns across degrees of magnitude.10 In James Gleick’s well-known popularization of chaos theory, in which Mandelbrot’s work plays a major role, the lion’s share of emphasis goes to scale invariance. Gleick’s language throughout suggests a bias toward self- similarity and a return to premodern microcosm/macrocosm analogies. As he writes,

Self-similarity is an easily recognizable quality. Its images are every- where in the culture: in the infinitely deep reflection of a person standing between two mirrors, or in the cartoon notion of a fish eating a smaller fish eating a smaller fish eating a smaller fish. Mandelbrot likes to quote Jonathan Swift: ‘So, Nat’ralists observe, A Flee / Hath smaller Flees that on him prey, / And these have smaller Fleas to bite ‘em, / And so proceed ad infinitum’ (1987, 103)

Swift’s parody of Leibniz is apt here, since Leibniz’s is the exemplary ­ontology of Russian-doll-like scale invariance.11 In biology, well-known essays from J.B.S. Haldane and Stephen Jay Gould address scale variance. In “On Being the Right Size” (1991) and “Size and Shape” (2006), respectively, they lay out reasons why insects cannot grow to the enormous sizes that we see in movies such as Them!, and, conversely, 204 Woods why large mammals cannot shrink to the size of insects. There are no giant ants or ant-sized cows because of the speed of diffusion of oxygen molecules. As Knut Schmidt-Nielsen notes, diffusion is fast over very short distances, but much slower beyond the length of a quarter inch (1984, 212). This means that insects do not need circulatory systems to pump oxygen through their bodies, as larger organisms do, but also that this form of circulation constrains the size to which insects can grow. In this example of scale variance, in which a physico-chemical constraint varies as a function of scale, lifeforms become limited to the domain to which they have adapted. Thus these essays offer explanations why we never do observe fleas scaling up and down ad infinitum. In a book on size in biology, John Tyler Bonner (2006) discusses a range of related cases. Many biological phenomena vary with size: for example, strength, surface area, complexity, and metabolic rate. Two often-cited examples are the strength-to-weight ratio and the surface area-to-volume ratio. D’Arcy Thompson’s 1917 On Growth and Form developed Galileo’s analysis of the relationship between strength and weight. Strength varies as weight to the power of 2/3. This constrains the size of trees and forecloses the existence of Brobdingnagian giants, since beyond a certain point, their limbs would have to be untenably massive to support their weight. Another example is the influence of gravity, which matters less and less as lifeforms get smaller. Mice and ants can survive long falls, but large mammals can- not. In still another example, the surface tension produced by van der Waals cohesion matters for small insects much more than for us, since they can drown if they break the surface of a body of water. In a trade-off, however, they can walk on walls and fall from great heights without damage. In a series of texts published over the last thirty years, Knut Schmidt- Nielsen (1984), Van Gardingen et al. (1997), J.H. Brown and Geoffrey B. West (2000), and Tamás Vicsek all point to similar phenomena in biology, phenomena which have received relatively little attention since molecular biology demoted the study of morphology in the mid-twentieth century. While certain properties of life are scale invariant, such as the relation of lung volume to body size in mammals, many are scale variant: as Schmidt- Nielsen argues, they change differentially and not geometrically (1984, 210–11). Drifting into literary criticism for a moment, Brown and West call the smooth scaling familiar from Alice in Wonderland an incorrect “expec- tation that organisms of the same general body would scale geometrically … that they would resemble one of those sets of size-nested painted wooden dolls from the Ukraine” (2000, 4). These biologists set up an opposition between scale invariance and scale variance, describing the latter as the rule rather than the exception. Thus, for Bonner,

It is possible to put large and minute organisms in quite separate bas- kets; there is a fundamental rift between the living worlds of the large and the very small, even though it is obviously continuum if one goes Scale Variance and the Concept of Matter 205 from large animals and plants to small ones; organisms come in all sizes in between. The reason for such an artificial separation of two size worlds has to do with the forces effecting totally different size levels. The effect of gravity becomes progressively insignificant the smaller an organism, while molecular forces come to the fore and play an increas- ingly important role. Even though these forces decline and rise smoothly as the size changes, one can artificially designate a critical point where one jumps from one world into the other. (2006, 40)

Perhaps this is the most important point to extract from the biological literature on size and scale. In the fictional texts that I discussed above, and in novels and films about shrinking and growing more broadly, the smooth continuum is the most common way of imagining scale. As in the filmHoney, I Shrunk the Kids, humans shrink down to the size of ants—but they continue to look like humans. By contrast, Bonner’s account of scale in biology gives us a picture of the interaction between organisms and their environments at different length scales that is full of disjuncture and differ- ently textured spaces. Scale variance looks nothing like smooth movement up and down a ruler, with its evenly spaced units which could extend infi- nitely and divide infinitesimally. Interpreting the rift named in the passage above clarifies our understand- ing of the concept of scale variance in materialism. The proximity of “con- tinuum” and “smooth” in the passage is a common feature in writing on scale. In comparing the terms “continuum” and “smooth” to “rift,” Bonner emphasizes the rift, which reads like a broken ruler or a scar on a clear surface. At the same time, the repetition of “even though” affects an anx- ious tone, as though the rift needs serious hedging. The repetition of “even though” suggests that we might not be able to point to this rift exactly, but that evolution is constrained by it nevertheless. Despite the fact that it is possible to measure space continuously in either direction, to choose two organisms of different sizes and find again and again an intermediate size, “one can designate a critical point” between worlds. The passage also sets up the relation among continuity, smoothness, and the rift with its repeti- tion of the word “artificial.” We can make an artificial mark, somewhere along the continuum, where we step from one world into another. Yet if the rift is fundamental, why this qualification? Why is the rift an artificial sepa- ration, if the size worlds are “totally different”? Bonner’s account of scale variance is equivocal on this point. In passages such as this one, where the language of separate worlds moves in the direction of ontology, he hesitates on the fence between an epistemological and an ontological account. Such passages present a materialist theory informed by the concept of scale vari- ance with a choice whether or not to take scale variance as an ontological difference and thus to build x number of scales into the theory. There is an inevitable epistemological dimension to this problem that asks to what 206 Woods extent scalar “worlds” are artifacts strictly of measure or of the constitu- tion of different creatures. Bonner relies on biological evidence that scale variance goes beyond measurement, but simultaneously, and in a contradic- tory way, holds to an epistemological account of scale grounded in units of measurement. In the specialist literature of ecology, there do not appear to be clear-cut ratios, such as the strength-to-weight ratio, that serve as geometrical anchors for understanding scale variance. Yet ecologists often use stronger language than Bonner to describe the phenomenon. Ecological research since the 1980s has seen a growing discourse on spatial and temporal scaling. According to David Schneider, usage of the word “scale” increases exponentially in the ecological literature in English 1980s, appearing most often to qualify results as scale specific (2001, 546). Simon Levin places scale at the center of his 1989 MacArthur lecture.12 In 2013, Jérôme Chave (2013) looks back on Levin’s influential lecture to review twenty years of research on scaling, invoking the same language of emergence and complex systems at work in the new materialism (4–16). As J.A. Wiens writes, ecology now delimits “domains of scale” separated by “relatively sharp transitions from dominance by one set of factors to dominance by other sets, like phase transitions in physical systems” (1989, 393).13 Scale domains, then, are the set of constraints on becoming that exist between these transitions. For Wiens in a separate paper, different patterns emerge at different scales of investigation in virtually any aspect of an ecological system. He notes that similar disjunctures may apply for time as well. Thus scale variance influences observation, but it comes to more than an artifact of perception–whether for humans or other observers. For Levin, ecosystems can be observed and studied at many scales, but their patterns of operation mark real breaks among scale domains (1992, 1960). As Wiens puts it, the assumption of “scale-independent, uniform patterns and processes” is false (1989, 387). When Levin frames scale domains, he shifts to the subjunctive. As in the passage from Bonner above, his argument sits on the fence between an epis- temological and an ontological account of scale variance:

the objective of a model should be to ask how much detail can be ignored without producing results that contradict specific sets of observations, on particular scales of interest. In such an analysis, natural scales and frequencies may emerge, and in these rests the essential nature of the system’s dynamics. (1992, 1944)

Contrasting with the use of terms such as “essence” and “nature,” the sub- junctive mood of this second sentence signals Levins’ hesitation about the reality of what Wiens calls scale domains. Of course, whether in ecology or social theory or art or history we can observe at different spatial scales Scale Variance and the Concept of Matter 207 and constitute a domain within which certain phenomena are revealed while others are hidden. For Levin, however, a good model should reduce the complexity of ecosystems without contradicting observations on par- ticular scales, allowing a “natural” scale domain to emerge. The word natural here connotes more than the proper measurement of the system in question. Yet Levin and Wiens also suggest an ontological difference between scale domains and the organisms and ecosystems they contain. This point adds another dimension to the problem of observation. Are scale domains zones of physical constraint, such as the differential influence of grav- ity, that bodies of a certain size and mass are subjected to? Or are scale domains also the product of the ecological interaction between organ- ism and environment, a whole complex of interactions that resheath, in a circular way, to create the spatial limits in which the same interactions occur? (One possible example here would be earth system and “Gaia” theories that conceive lifeforms as creating the same atmosphere to which they adapt.) Another possibility is that scale domains and complexities of scale (in)variance are the product of chaotic forces that do not yet have clear explanations, or even names. The central point here, which informs Bonner’s and other biological examples, is that scale domains can either be size ranges within which a particular set of constraints, such as quantum coherence or Brownian motion, have the most influence, or they can be entities produced contingently, by the interaction of the smaller-scale enti- ties that inhabit them. This ambivalence in Bonner and Levin and others does not deny the existence of scale effects, for which there is ample evidence, but rather defers the ontological argument that I am attempting in this chapter. Missing in both cases is an interpretation that would crystallize a general concept of scale variance. For a concept of scale that goes beyond meas- ure, to restate my central point, we need to think ontological rifts among scale domains. As Bonner notes above, it might be difficult to point to the exact line that separates size worlds. Where this line exists, how physical forces produce it, and the extent to which it is relative to the sizes and other properties of systems are empirical questions. The ontological ver- sion of scale variance would argue that this gap exists: that there are scale domains, not simply arbitrary measurements of length. Embracing this argument as a starting point resolves the ambivalence that we found in Bonner and Levin. The relationship between scale variance and the scale domain is then one of mutual definition. Scale variance is the difference between or among scale domains; scale domains presuppose a qualitative difference that is not foundationally a function of measurement even if measurement is one of the techniques required to notice this difference in the first place. Scale variance is thedifference; ­ scale domains are the distinguished. 208 Woods Scale in Barad and DeLanda For new materialists, matter is something far different from what we had thought within a certain mechanistic paradigm that describes it as the other of thought or spirit, a paradigm which finds its figureheads in Descartes, Newton’s laws of motion, and LaPlace. In Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Friedrich Engels referred to this way of thinking about matter as a materialism of the mechanical (1886, Part 2). New materialists such as Barad and DeLanda consider this bad material- ism to be an ontological hangover from early modern and Enlightenment thought. To replace this ontology, we need concepts that can account for the strange results emerging from the natural sciences since the early twen- tieth century. Karen Barad and Manuel DeLanda are two of the strong- est theorists who pursue this approach to connecting the natural sciences with philosophy. DeLanda (2002 and 2006) draws primarily on the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Barad (2007) develops Niels Bohr’s work on complementarity and concepts of performativity developed by philosophers such as Judith Butler toward a theory of the entanglement of matter and meaning. Barad and DeLanda address scale in very different ways that help show what role the concept might play in new materialist theory. In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad (2007) argues that the universe is not divided into separate scale domains. She makes this point in a num- ber of places, always in the context of arguments that quantum effects are universal and not limited to tiny sub-atomic scales. One of the central stakes of Barad’s book is a new interpretation of quantum mechanics. This inter- pretation, based on her concept of agential realism, promises to build on Bohr’s interpretation while removing its humanist elements. Barad proposes an “onto-epistemology” that is posthuman and performative because the co-production of subjects (subjects which need not be human) and objects create new material realities through their relation. Barad reads Bohr via theorists such as Butler in a way that generalizes from quantum physics to create a wider philosophy of nature. For this reason, her materialist the- ory requires that quantum phenomena be generalized across scales and not restricted to the microworld. This is the reason why the assertion that there are no fundamental rifts among scale domains repeats throughout Meeting the Universe Halfway. A close look at one example clarifies that text’s investment in scale invari- ance as opposed to scale variance. For Barad,

no evidence exists to support the belief that the physical world is divided into two separate domains, each with its own set of physical laws: a microscopic domain governed by the laws of quantum physics, and a macroscopic domain governed by the laws of Newtonian physics. Indeed, quantum mechanics is the most successful and accurate theory in the history of physics, accounting for phenomena over a range of Scale Variance and the Concept of Matter 209 twenty-five orders of magnitude, from the smallest particles of matter to large-scale objects. (2007, 110)

Driven by the need to make Bohr’s theory of complementarity scalable, Barad suggests that the physical world has no rifts. Quantum theory mat- ters for objects across huge differences of magnitude. Though “there are major obstacles to observing quantum behavior for large-scale systems … in principle we ought to be able to observe quantum behavior in macro- scopic systems” (2007, 279). In these passages from Meeting the Universe Halfway, the process of extracting concepts from physics and generalizing them—a process which entails major changes of register from physics to social theory and philosophy—creates a scale-invariant picture of the uni- verse. Since there is no rift between macro and micro, the overall effect of Barad’s onto-epistemology is one of continuity among scales. Such a picture is in contrast with my account in the previous section, where scale variance and the scale domain become mutually determined concepts that describe a universe in which there are at least two scales separated by a difference of kind. Barad’s understandable reiteration of the point that quantum entan- glements are not limited to a micro domain (a point that has been sup- ported by recent experiments) has the side effect of making scale difference ontologically invisible in general.14 In Barad’s materialism, the process of generalizing from physics thus leaves us with no way of interpreting the evidence reviewed above. For most new materialist thinkers, the goal is not only to rethink received concepts and oppositions linked to matter, but to put these concepts to political use—even, for example, to update Marxist political economy.15 Barad uses her materialism to analyze power dynamics in a Calcutta jute factory. In her account of the local and global power relations surround- ing the factory, we see scale-invariant materialism applied beyond physics and philosophy. Extrapolating from her emphasis on the continuity among scales, Barad concurs with geographer Neil Smith’s critique of nested hier- archies of scale.

In contrast to some unfortunate geometrical readings of the notion of scale (whereby the nesting relationship “local < national < global” is presumed to hold in the absence of any critical examination), the geog- rapher Neil Smith explicitly explores the exclusionary nature of the pro- duction of scale … This insight can be understood in terms of the fact that “scale” refers to a property of spatial phenomena intra-actively produced, contested, and reproduced … As Smith emphasizes, “it is precisely the active social connectedness of scales that is vital.” This “connectedness” should be understood not as linkages among preexist- ing nested scales but as the agential enfolding of different scales through one another (so that, for example, the different scales of individual 210 Woods bodies, homes, communities, regions, nations, and the global are not seen as geometrically nested in accordance with some physical notion of size but rather are understood as being intra-actively produced through one another). (2007, 245)16

This passage contains two distinct versions of scale. The first is the “geo- metrical,” or perhaps cartographical. We remember from the previous sec- tion that the critic Clark and the biologists Brown and West also target the cartographical conception of scale in their study of scale variance. For Smith and Barad, the hierarchical nesting from local to global inevitably privi- leges one scale over another, for example as the most politically significant. Barad rightly critiques the “nesting relationship,” since it is this “Russian- doll” model that maps most directly onto the smooth-zoom scale aesthet- ics that I discuss above. Since the “social connectedness of scales is vital,” she synthesizes her scale-invariant materialism with the social relations that implicate the local in the global and the global in the local. Her language of intraaction mirrors the language she uses to describe the observation of elec- trons by measuring instruments. This account of scale thus amounts to the claim that relations precede their terms: preformed scales do not interact, but rather scales domains are the product of the intraaction of matter. The notion that scales intraact “through” one another, in the presence of Smith’s “connectedness,” suggests that continuity among scales is ultimately more important than their disjuncture. In this application of new materialist theory, as in the theoretical exam- ple above, there is no provision for ontological rifts among size worlds. Barad’s starting point in physics leads to fascinating readings of Bohr and other physicists, but what falls into the blind spot of this same focus is the evidence of scale variance at large in other disciplines. Returning to the question of how to interpret the rift between size worlds, Barad’s effort to defeat the dualism of micro/macro in physics leads to an erasure of the rift. The ontology implied by the scalability of quantum mechan- ics makes ontologically invisible, at the level of the materialist system of concepts, the difference described by scale variance. The question of the emphasis on physics rather than another natural science leads to con- versations that I cannot discuss in detail. But with philosophers such as Thalos, we can counter the assumption that physics should be the privi- leged science for a materialist theory. Certainly the ontological claims of the new materialism go beyond the realm of physics. Materialism does not signify a focus only on the most universal properties of matter, and this raises further questions about the role of the concept of matter. For now, it is enough to suggest that the specific natural science emphasized by materialist thinkers impacts the ultimate rhetorical and conceptual structure of the theory. Scale Variance and the Concept of Matter 211 The emphasis on monist continuity, relation, and openness in the new materialism has the side effect of leaving scale variance unthought. In Meeting the Universe Halfway, intraactivity leads to a choice between two kinds of relation: relations among already constituted entities and genera- tive relations that precede their terms. For Barad, intraactivity indicates the second choice and quantum theory supports it. Intraactivity militates against the “metaphysics of individualism” by suggesting that there are no individual things prior to relation (2007, 5). The prefix intra- suggests that we are already one, not separate or discrete enough to inter-act. Activity occurs on the inside of a relation without prior terms, since “the primary ontological unit is not independent objects with independently determi- nate boundaries and properties but rather what Bohr terms ‘phenomena’” (2007, 33). In Barad’s agential-realist elaboration, “phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of observer and observed, or the results of measurements; rather, phenomena are the ontological insepa- rability of agentially intra-acting components … the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action.” Intra- supports an ontology of the interior. Objects are always already inside a broader context that relates to itself internally, like faces emerging from a swarming understory that comes before them and crosses their boundaries. Intraaction has advantages for materialism insofar as it describes complex sociality among humans and nonhumans and seeks to avoid taking reified objects as its basic unit of analysis. For the interpreta- tion of scale variance, intraaction has the disadvantage of ensuring that the logic of intra- undermines scale variance by understanding the production of scales only through one another. This language sets up a material through- line that cuts across differences of scale, so that positive substance precedes the rift of scale variance and ensures that it is always filled. Intra-action begins with an underlying identity that acts on itself to produce objects and scale domains, which then begin to seem epiphenomenal. In Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Manuel DeLanda (2002) continues his project of reading “new (non-linear, anti-mechanistic, anti- reductionist) sciences” such as chaos and complexity theory through the lens of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy. In particular, DeLanda conjugates the “three ontological dimensions which constitute the Deleuzian world: the virtual, the intensive, and the actual” (2002, 55). The virtual is a reservoir of potentiality that is abstract, but real and immanent. The intensive refers to processes that need not change with mass or size, by analogy with tem- perature and pressure. The actual refers to concrete objects. DeLanda’s title shows accurately where the emphasis falls in this triad: on the “relatively undifferentiated and continuous” space that precedes the differentiation of actual individuals (2002, 49). As he writes, “the individuals populating the actual world would be like the discontinuous spatial or metric structures which condense out of a nonmetric, virtual continuum” (2002, 55). The 212 Woods virtual space from which individuals actualize stands as a replacement for the fixed types and essences of an unspecified “essentialist thinking”—in this respect, DeLanda shares a motive with Barad in critiquing the metaphys- ics of individualism, though he develops a different alternative (2002, 54). There is a strong parallel between the virtual and intraactivity. While DeLanda gives emergence some pride of place, his approach to it makes scale variance secondary to a more basic monist ontology. Two examples from Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy demonstrate this point. The first is an analogy between the biological scales from cell to organism and the physical scales from an atom of gold to a macroscopic piece of gold. The passage gives an account of the relationship between scale and emergence that is close to the ontology of scale domains, differ- ing only in that emergence relies on an origin narrative that starts with the very small.

Much as between individual cells and the individual organisms which they compose there are several intermediate structures, bridging the two scales (tissues, organs, organ systems) so between individual atoms of gold and an individual bulk piece of solid material there are inter- mediately scaled structures that bridge the micro and macro scales: individual atoms form crystals; individual crystals form small grains; individual small grains form larger grains, and so on. Both crystals and grains of different sizes are individuated following specific causal pro- cesses, and the properties of an individual bulk sample emerge from the causal interactions between these intermediate structures. There are some properties of gold, such as having a specific melting point, which by definition do not belong to individual gold atoms since single atoms do not melt … The properties of a bulk sample do not emerge all at once at a given critical scale but appear one at a time at difference scales. (2013, 34)

In the second passage, several aspects of DeLanda’s description make scale variance epiphenomenal to the “relatively undifferentiated and contin- uous” category of the virtual, minimizing the importance of the rift through a series of part/whole analogies. This becomes clear when he describes the relation of individuals at different scales as a flat ontology. For this ontology,

Institutional organizations, urban centers, and nation states are not abstract totalities, but concrete social individuals, with the same onto- logical status as individual human beings but operating at larger spatio- temporal scales … Like organisms and species, the relationship between individuals at each spatio-temporal scale is one of parts to whole, with each individual emerging from the causal interactions among the mem- bers of populations of smaller scale individuals. (2002, 147) Scale Variance and the Concept of Matter 213 DeLanda’s flat ontology describes the self-similarity across scales of the concept of the individual, making it incompatible with scale variance. Much like the superorganism concept created in the early twentieth century by entomologist William Morton Wheeler as a means of understanding how social insect collectives hold together, this flat ontology repeats the biological individual at scales larger (and presumably also smaller) than the scale of the organism. The self-similarity of scales—a term often used for the fractal pat- terns of the Mandelbrot set and for the empirical phenomena that approxi- mate them—is also at work in the logic of part and whole that DeLanda uses throughout the text. Despite his interest in emergence, this Russian-doll symmetry of part and whole, which corresponds to his flat ontology of indi- viduals, demands that what is a part at one scale will contribute to a whole at another scale—which whole will again be a part from the perspective of a still-larger whole. The symmetry of this relationship corresponds to the iden- tity supposed by the ascription of the “same ontological status” to different scales.17 The point is that both DeLanda’s argument and the philosophi- cal language in which he casts it reinforces the notion that scale domains either do not exist or do not register as an ontological difference. As a result, DeLanda neutralizes the stronger implications of scale variance that appear in the first passage, implications which would lead us to embrace the rift, broken symmetry, and ontological difference among scales.18 Another similarity between Barad and DeLanda comes from DeLanda’s (2002) account of the virtual as a continuous space, which overlaps with Barad’s (2007) emphasis on the intraactivity of matter that precedes the production of scale. Actual objects bud from a “virtual continuum” “which yields, through progressive differentiation, all the discontinuous individu- als that populate the actual world” (2002, 72; my emphasis). What makes this account of actualization similar to intraactivity is the emphasis on a continuity that comes before discrete objects and the differentiation of scale domains. DeLanda does note the heterogeneous character of the vir- tual, avoiding the hylomorphic claim that would imagine differentiation as form imposed on formless matter. Drawing on the critique of hylomor- phism in Simondon and Deleuze, his point in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy is to show that the differences implicit in the virtual allow for the morphogenesis of actual, “discontinuous individuals.” Yet his opposi- tion between the continuous and the discontinuous and his tendency to place the continuous in a position of temporal, narrative priority have implications for the theory scale similar to those of Barad’s intraactivity. The continuous virtual space underlying the differentiation of individu- als at different scales ensures that scale variance is epiphenomenal to an underlying, active matter. If a strong reading of the rift requires disconti- nuity, this priority of the continuous in morphogenesis is a limitation on DeLanda’s account of scale. Whatever the advantages to the concept of the virtual in other contexts, in DeLanda’s materialism it flattens ontological differences among scale domains. 214 Woods Natura Facit Saltum Following Gilles Deleuze and others, DeLanda’s materialism is a monist one: everything is immanent. Monism is a common stance in the new mate- rialism, but as suggested above, its use of the concept of matter debatably defaults in this direction even when monism is not the explicit argument. While examples of explicitly non-monist materialism exist, monism seems in most cases to be a consequence of how theorists use the concept of matter and how they develop their approach to emergence. In this respect, many new materialists would likely embrace Leibniz’s phrase natura non facit saltum—nature makes no leaps. What if nature does make leaps? This stark alternative would take us back to arguments about continuity and discontinuity such as those worked through by Henri Bergson in Creative Evolution. For him, continuity and flux is the underlying reality of the universe. Gaps and boundaries such as membranes and walls are sutured under by matter: “the real whole might well be, we conceive, an indivisible continuity”—“systems we cut out within it would, properly speaking, not then be parts at all; they would be partial views of the whole” (1944, 36). At present, it seems to me that this bias is in force as a common and unexamined assumption. To assume that there is an underlying unity to the universe seems more accurate than the claim that there are discontinuities, such as the rifts among scale domains. Continuity seems more real than discontinuity. Yet the twentieth-century natural sci- ences are full of exceptions to this claim, from the quantized character of energy to the role of discrete units in information (and thus in DNA), to instances of punctuated evolution through symbiosis.19 Insofar as ontology is open to empirical editing, these points weigh against monism. For the “transcendental materialist” philosopher Adrian Johnston, in prose that enacts its content, “weak nature” is a “detotalized, disunified not-One/not- All of distinct, heterogeneous levels and layers of beings shot through with and riven by a thriving plethora of antagonisms, conflicts, fissures, splits, and … intra-natural negativities which short-circuit what otherwise would be … the determinism of a single, God-like Nature with its compulsory commandments.”20 In Donna Haraway’s useful chiasmus, “nothing is con- nected to everything; everything is connected to something” (2016, 31).21 One advantage of embracing a nature with non-secondary leaps and rifts is that it invites a rapprochement between new materialisms and the poststruc- turalist approaches (with their focus on discontinuity and the digital) that the former at times set themselves off against. This continuity and unity supposed to exist at a more basic level than the apparent discreteness of things is as much an ontological choice as is the “metaphysics of individualism” critiqued by thinkers such as Barad (2007). This is not to say that we should replace monism with individualism or a theory of isolated substances that never relate to one another. The notion that scale variance is the difference that distinguishes scale domains still supports the possibility of openness and continuity, whether with “higher” Scale Variance and the Concept of Matter 215 or “lower” scales. The difference here is that continuity is not given priority over discontinuity. They paradoxically co-exist. Recourse to monism seems to be a way to smooth away this paradox, or to privilege only one of its terms. With the rift established ontologically, it is still possible to adduce exceptions to scale variance, from the shoreline of Mandelbrot’s Britain to quantum phenomena that well up to scales at which they were previously thought to average out, as described in the new field of quantum biology.22 The need to keep discontinuity in view in new materialist thought sup- ports a change of concept from emergence to scale variance. This is where I find support in Thalos’ (2013) Without Hierarchy, which frames “scale freedom” as an alternative to both emergentism and reductionism.23 As she compactly puts it, “emergentism aspires to an antireductive stance, but it is still implicitly committed to a single-scale universe” (44). The central prob- lem with emergentism is supervenience. When any y at one level of reality supervenes on some x at a lower level, then any change in y entails a change in x. Supervenience maintains a con- nection between “levels” that prevents emergentism from mutating into full-on dualism or pluralism. While there are degrees of supervenience in the literature, two points show the role of supervenience in new materi- alist emergentism of the kind at work in DeLanda. First, the fact that a single concept, matter, designates what everything is made of implies that (no matter the scale of activity) it is primarily matter’s action that explains (for example) a liver or a corporation. The concept of matter plays this role whether or not there are emergent properties of livers that cannot be pre- dicted from physics or chemistry. Second, as in DeLanda, accounts of emer- gence often involve an origin story that starts with the very small and builds up layers of complexity. The red thread of material identity that he estab- lishes across “levels of complexity” is a form of supervenience. Complexity emerges spontaneously from matter. Thalos suggests that we abandon supervenience. She replaces this model with one of a scale-free universe in which there is no Vienna school hierarchy of levels, no schema of levels “up” and levels “down” to render concepts such as reduction and downward causality meaningful. Instead, she asks “on what scales do we see independent variables manifesting themselves?” and develops a range of evidence toward an ontology for which “there is activity at every scale” and “no special or privileged scale at which to view activity in the universe” (2013, 6, 17).24 Thalos’ formulation of scale variance is close to my own, but the latter would not require that there be activity at every scale of measurement, since it relies instead on evidence of specific rifts among scale domains within which there could be scales (not domains) where no new kind of activity arises—patches of continuity bordered by discontinuity. Thalos’ repeated use of activity at important junctures corresponds with the practice of treating matter in the active voice in the writing practice of the new materialisms. Most important, she gives us an ontological formula- tion that can incorporate evidence of scale variance and differentiate “mat- ter” into a more diverse and situated set of concepts. 216 Woods My argument departs from Thalos’ when she makes her scale-free approach compatible with materialism and monism—for her, the unity of reality and the corresponding unity of science are consistent with scale vari- ance (2013, 203, 222, 266).25 It is here that the concept of matter becomes fundamental and pushes her argument in the direction of a monism that her account of scale seems to undermine. Her argument moves in the direction of what Johnston calls “the One-All of Nature-with-a-capital-N.” By con- trast, my interpretation of the rift of scale variance suggests that there is at least one difference that needs to be taken into account without embedding it in a more universal, more constantly present underlying category. The implication for new materialism of the strong reading of scale vari- ance is that materialism could abandon the concept of matter, particularly if matter is associated with monism. Monism is preferable to dualism, and often used to replace it, but monism has the limitation of referring all differ- ence back to an underlying unity. What is most original and foundational is substance, from which (to use Spinoza’s language) attributes and modes differentiate while maintaining their basic connection to the One. As we saw in Barad (2007) and DeLanda (2002 and 2006), matter appears beneath scale domains, which begin to look epiphenomenal. For them, scale vari- ance is simply the result of an emergence out of matter. Since this chapter’s experiment is to push the concept of scale variance as far as possible, to give an ontological account of it, this version of materialism becomes unfeasible. It is not that matter behaves differently at different scales, but that scale domains constrain the activity of the entities within them. Suppose that we lived in a simplified universe with only three scale domains. If we take the ontological reading of scale variance into account, we would be unable to say that there is a more basic entity, matter, that simply behaves in different ways at these different scales. Such an argument would return us to the one- scale universe that Thalos critiques. Two closing examples can quickly distinguish the positive explanatory value of scale variance from its usefulness for negative critique (if we want to use these terms). Perhaps these examples come too late, but they would not be clear without the foregoing discussion of emergence and scale vari- ance. In my view, the linked concepts of scale (in)variance and the scale domain are sufficient basis for a separate body of theory, or at least a nec- essary component of the materialisms, realisms, and naturalisms that seek new engagements with the sciences. One oft-cited example of emergence is the behavior of swarms, flocks, schools of fish, and human crowds. In complexity theory, swarm intelligence, like the “superorganism,” is commonly explained as a phenomenon that exceeds the sum of its parts.26 The swarm is a guiding trope for non-dialec- tical materialism, old and new. Lucretius uses the transcalar analogy of the swarm in De Rerum Natura, when the speaker describes the motion of atoms: “what / countless shapes primordial seeds assume / How vast their variance: for, though myriads swarm / Of equal figures, oft unlike they meet” (VI).27 Scale Variance and the Concept of Matter 217 In this analogy across scales, insect group behavior stands in for the behavior­ of matter. Much later, in Diderot’s “D’Alembert’s Dream,” “the world, or the general mass of matter, is the great hive.”28 If there is only one mass of matter, the self-organization of smaller structures forms larger ones, much as bees aggregate to form a higher order unity. The swarm figure also makes an appearance in Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, when she discusses distributed agency. Swarm replaces subject, since “a theory of distributive agency … does not posit a subject as the root cause of an effect. There are instead always a swarm of vitalities at play” (2010, 32). A similar image charac- terizes emergence in the anti-mechanistic tradition of materialism that she favors, in which “unformed elements and materials dance” and material- ist monism is compatible with “complex, emergent causality” (2010, 91). In this emergence-friendly monism, and here Bennett writes with Michel Serres, “the same vortical logic holds across different scales of size, time, and complexity” (2010, 119). What these examples have in common is the conceptual interdependence of swarming, emergence, and scale invariance. Small parts interact to form larger wholes, but a red thread of symmetry and analogy maintains self-similarity across scales. An example better explained by scale variance than emergence-from is the climate system of the earth. While swarm behavior does seem to start from parts and build up toward larger-scale phenomena, the same is not true of climate. The climate system occupies a scale domain of its own that includes the atmosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere. The distinction between climate and weather is necessary because, as earth-magnitude and local phenomena respectively, neither is reducible to the other. The now-canonical error of climate denialists who point to cold weather to contradict global warm- ing might be understood as an inability to recognize scale variance. Global average temperature is increasing whether local temperatures are warmer or colder. In a similar way, the delay effects discussed in relation to climate change (even if we stop emitting carbon now, the carbon cycle will take at least a thousand years to deal with the existing surfeit) are phenomena specific to the scale domain of the earth. The climate system is not built out of smaller weather events. Even considered historically in terms of the planet’s origin, there was never a time at which the climate emerged from smaller constituents of matter. The climate does have relations with other scale domains and the ecosystems, organisms, elements, and so on that they contain, but I doubt that it can be explained without reference to the scale domain that only it occupies (joined now by our technospecies), a scale domain bounded by the stratosphere and the mantle and constrained by its unique negotiation of solar radiation and gravity. Incompatible with monism, scale variance and the scale domain support a pluralist ontology that distinguishes scale domains without incorporat- ing them into a more general substance. In this respect, I embrace Graham Harman’s (2011) critique of the monist-materialist “monotheology of the depths,” even if scale variance is incompatible with his flat ontology.29 218 Woods Ontology from the vantage of scale variance would need to include 1 + n scale domains. Since evidence points to the existence of more than two, this ontology would in practice not be a dualism, but rather a pluralism con- sisting of an open-ended, finite, but possibly undecideable number of scale domains. In Spinoza’s terms, we would have 1 + n attributes and the usual infinity of modes, but no unifying substance. What distinguishes this point of view from Whitehead’s (1929) and Harman’s (2011) is that their ontolo- gies, in an inversion of Spinoza’s emphasis, have room only for modes.30 In the spirit of creative ontology, new materialism without matter could go on critiquing dualism by conceptualizing these attributes (how many are there?), rather than falling back on monism. A general theory of scale domains could be a continuation of the Whiteheadean project of creating, as Steven Shaviro (2009) puts it, “a metaphysics that frees itself from the outdated assumptions of classical (Cartesian and Newtonian) thought as thoroughly as twentieth-century physics does.”31 The advantage of such an engagement is that it involves science studies more deeply in philosophy, inviting detailed interpretations of the strangers that appear in microscopes, telescopes, and particle colliders.32 For Rosie Braidotti (2012), “what matters for materialism today is the concept of matter itself.”33 One step in this project could be differentiat- ing, revising, and even abandoning that concept. When we interpret even the statements of physics and chemistry as results about matter, we switch to the register of ontology. But matter could get in the way of an ontology suitable to what “matter” can do. There seems to be little reason to posit an unformed matter from which all forms emerge. The concept of matter has a history difficult to divorce from the conceptual baggage of “the matter dreamt by immaterialist philosophers,” a matter laden with historical traces from the tradition of defining it in the negative—as the absence of form or spirit, in hylomorphic terms, or in a patriarchal hierarchy of matter and form.34

Notes 1 A non-exhaustive list embraces key thinkers in this young-but-complex field: See Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Manuel DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and The Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, and Bruno Latour’s (1988) The Pasteurization of France. While Graham Harman does not consider his approach a materialism, the critique of ontological reduc- tion is also central to his object-oriented philosophy. See Immaterialism (2016). 2 See for example Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010). Monism (and imma- nence without transcendence) are explicitly important in the work of Rosie Braidotti, Manuel DeLanda, Elizabeth Grosz, Levi R. Bryant, McKenzie Wark, and others. In the introduction to New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (2012) note that “new materialism … has a renewed interest in philosophical monism or in the phi- losophy of immanence” (85). We can see this tendency also in the ­philosophy Scale Variance and the Concept of Matter 219 of Gilles Deleuze, which is deeply influential for the new materialism. While Deleuze maintains a paradoxical devotion to both monism and pluralism, as in his formula “MONISM = PLURALISM,” much of his work easily reads as monism. Monism and Spinozism are also at work in post-Marxist theory influenced by Deleuze, especially in the work of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. 3 See also Clark’s (2015) more recent Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as Threshold Concept. In “Spatial Scale Problems and Geostatistical Solutions,” P. M. Atkinson and Nicholas J. Tate (2000) suggest a similar distinction between cartographic scale and definitions of scale more synonymous with size (607). See also P.M. Atkinson, “Spatial Scale and Spatial Dependence” (2007, 55). 4 Deleuze and Guattari (2004). 5 Thus not all scale difference is compatible with my position: “levels” that col- lapse (ontologically or epistemologically) via reduction are not scale variant ontological domains. See Rudolf Carnap (1967), The Logical Structure of the World. Peter Galison (1997) discusses the Vienna School’s hierarchy of levels in Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (781–803). 6 See for example Colin Milburn (2008), Nanovision: Engineering the Future, Judith Roof (2007), The Poetics of DNA, Wai Chee Dimock (2008), Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. While Dimock emphasizes fractal geometry (defined below) and thus scale invariance in this book, in her later response to Mark McGurl she discusses “non-recursive” rela- tions among scales. 7 See Dipesh Chakrabarty (2012), “Postcolonial Studies in the Era of Climate Change”; Timothy Morton (2013), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World; Ursula Heise (2008), Sense of Place and Sense of Planet; and Derek Woods (2014), “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene.” While I have not focused on discussions of scale from the social sciences, Anna Tsing’s (2015) work on “nonscalability” makes use of a similar concept to scale variance to discuss economies that resist or simply cannot yield the “economies of scale” that result from quantitative increase in production. 8 In light of this problem and this opening, my method is “extraction,” to use one of Myra Hird’s (2009) three terms for approaching the natural sciences from the outside: critique, extraction, and engagement (330–31). If engagement implies something like anthropological work, my chapter is closer to extraction because it draws on empirical evidence to make an ontological argument. 9 Statistical mechanics is another example. Boltzmann and Gibbs developed a means of correlating the mechanical movements of atoms with the macroscopic properties of a system. This scale shift required a re-interpretation of Newtonian mechanics in statistical terms. A final example is what Thalos (2013) calls the microphysical “resheathing” of electrons as bosons in superconductors held at extremely low temperatures (68). 10 Benoit Mandelbrot discovered a geometry based on fractal sets that repeat them- selves on multiple scales. When you zoom in on a fractal pattern or out from it, you see the same pattern again. The Mandelbrot set has become a canonical example of scale invariance. See The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982). As R. John Williams (2016) notes, the Mandelbrot set became a pop-cultural image, later featuring in such prominent contexts as the scenario-planning publications of Royal Dutch/Shell (535). 11 As Leibniz writes in a famous passage, “Each portion of matter may be conceived as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fish. But every branch of every plant, ever member of each animal, and every drop of their liquid parts is in itself like-wise a similar garden or pond” (1965, 159). 220 Woods 12 In his MacArthur Award Lecture, Levin opens with two sweeping points. First, the “problem of pattern and scale” has the potential to solve ecology’s own problem of quantum gravity: the much-debated relation between population and ecosystem ecology. Second, the problem of pattern and scale is crucial for under- standing climate change (1992, 1944). 13 Wiens (1989) goes on to elaborate a useful distinction that finds a middle ground between a universe without any continuity across scales and one without dis- continuity: “Scale-dependency in ecological systems may be continuous, every change in scale bringing with it changes in patterns and processes. If this is so, generalizations will be hard to find, for the range of extrapolation of studies at a given scale will be severely limited. If the scale spectrum is not continuous, however, there may be domains of scale, regions of the spectrum over which, for a particular phenomenon in a particular ecological system, patterns either do not change or change monotonically with changes in scale” (392). 14 See for example A. D. O’Connell et al. (2010), “Quantum Ground State and Single Photon Control of a Mechanical Resonator.” 15 The separate question of how smoothly ethical and political norms should flow from ontologies is also important here, but beyond my scope. 16 Smith’s argument corresponds to that of Sallie A. Marston et al. (2005) in “Human Geography without Scale.” 17 The point of this reading is not to argue that DeLanda is an organicist—in a later book, he explicitly distances himself from this tradition. See Manuel DeLanda (2006), New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. 18 For the classic account of broken symmetry, see P. W. Anderson (1972), “More Is Different.” 19 This last instance was already discussed by the Russian biologist Boris Kozo Polyansky in the late nineteenth century, in Symbiogenesis (2010, xxvi). From a more epistemological perspective, it would seem that (here temporal) scale fram- ing is the first step to determining what counts as a leap and what seems instead to be a gradually accretive, continuous, erosion-like process. 20 Adrian Johnston, “Interview with Adrian Johnston on Transcendental Materialism” (2013b). Johnston’s work incorporates Hegel’s critique of Spinoza and seeks a synthesis of dialectical materialism and new materialism. For a sup- porting position, see Timothy Morton (2007), Ecology without Nature. As he writes, “Dualistic interpretations are highly dubious. But so are monist ones— there is no (single, independent, lasting) ‘thing’ underneath the dualist concept” (48). 21 For a supporting position, see Levi R. Bryant (2013), “Black” (302–303). 22 See Philip Ball (2011), “The Physics of Life: The Dawn of Quantum Biology,” and Johnjoe McFadden and Jim Al-Khalili (2014), Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology. 23 Thalos in turn draws on Jaegwon Kim’s (1999) critique of emergentism in “Making Sense of Emergence.” 24 In the passage cited above, there is a resonance with Harman’s (2009) reading of Bruno Latour’s Irreductions—with his claim that there is no bottom or top object to which other objects can be reduced. See Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Instead of reduction implying simply a “downward” direction, a privilege of the bottom level as explanatory, reductionism can also move upwards (as in the case of holism). In this respect, the theory of scale domains might be a way of escaping the topos of levels and the up/down hierarchy it propagates. 25 In a similar way, speculative realist philosopher Levi R. Bryant’s (2014) argu- ment for materialism in Onto-cartography undercuts his claim for a “pluriv- erse” in which entities “do not add up to a totality that forms a universe.” On the one hand, he argues that “all that materialism requires is that whatever else Scale Variance and the Concept of Matter 221 a thing might be, it must be physical” (116, 236). On the other hand, Bryant writes that “I am not convinced that matter is one type of thing. Rather, every- thing seems to point to the conclusion that there are many different types of matter” (6). 26 See Eric Bonabeau et al. (1999) Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems. Scholars such as Diane M. Rodgers, John Johnston, Eugene Thacker, and Sebastian Vehlken discuss the implications of swarming for sociology, artifi- cial intelligence research, media theory, and the study of self-organization.­ 27 Lucretius, On the Nature of Things. Book 6. http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/ nature_things.6.vi.html 28 Adrian Johnston describes Diderot’s materialist monism as an onto-theological one. For him, “D’Alembert’s Dream contains an explicit affirmation of the uni- fied oneness of a natural All as the sole real being to be hypothesized by a defen- sible ontology” (2013a, 18). 29 Graham Harman (2011), “Realism without Materialism.” 30 Alfred North Whitehead writes that “the trouble with Spinoza is that he bases his philosophy upon the monistic substance, of which the actual occasions are inferior modes.” Whitehead “inverts this point of view.” Process and Reality (Macmillan, 1929; New York: Free Press, 1978), 98. For a detailed comparison of other similarities and differences between Harman and Whitehead, see Steven Shaviro, Into the Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 31 Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 24. 32 Whether we still want to call this project of redescription “metaphysics” and “ontology” is a separate and important question, one that invites a so-far-missing re-evaluation of the new materialist break from poststructuralism, of the ques- tion to what extent poststructuralism was ever as strictly discursive as some crit- ics have made it out to be, and of the new materialism’s relationship to systems theories. 33 Rosie Braidotti (2012), “Afterword.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. 34 Mario Bunge (2011), Causality and Modern Science. For the role of the con- cept of matter in patriarchal philosophy, see Irina Aristarkhova (2012), The Hospitality of The Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture.

Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy and Susan Hekman. 2008. Material Feminisms. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Anderson, P.W. 1972. “More Is Different.” Science 177 (4047): 393–96. Aristarkhova, Irina. 2012. The Hospitality of The Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Atkinson, P.M. 2007. “Spatial Scale and Spatial Dependence.” Scaling Up: From Cell to Landscape. Edited by P. R. Van Gardingen et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Atkinson, P.M and Nicholas J. Tate. 2000. “Spatial Scale Problems and Geostatistical Solutions.” Professional Geographer 52.4: 607–23. Ball, Philip. 2011. “The Physics of Life: The Dawn of Quantum Biology.” Nature 474: 272–74. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 222 Woods Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bergson, Henri. 1944. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York: Random House. Bonabeau, Eric et al. 1999. Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems. New York: Oxford University Press. Bonner, John Tyler. 2006. Why Size Matters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Braidotti, Rosie. 2012. “Afterword.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 17.2: 171. Brown, James H. et al. 2000. “Scaling in Biology: Patterns and Processes, Causes and Consequences.” In Scaling in Biology, edited by James H. Brown and Geoffrey B. West. New York: Oxford University Press. Bryant, Levi R. 2013. “Black.” Prismatic Ecology. Edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bryant, Levi R. 2014. Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bunge, Mario. 2011. Causality and Modern Science. New York: Dover. Carnap, Rudolf. 1967. The Logical Structure of the World. Translated by R. George. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2012. “Postcolonial Studies in the Era of Climate Change.” New Literary History 43.1: 1–18. Chave, Jérôme. 2013. “The Problem of Pattern and Scale in Ecology: What Have We Learned in Twenty Years?” Ecology Letters 16.1: 4–16. Clark, Timothy. 2015. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury. Clark, Timothy. 2012. Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1. Edited by Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Davies, Paul. 1989. “Introduction.” Physics and Philosophy. London: Penguin. DeLanda, Manuel. 2006. New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. DeLanda, Manuel. 2013. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. Dimock, Wai Chee. 2008. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dolphijn, Rick and Iris van der Tuin. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Engels, Friedrich. 1886. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. 25 September 2016. Available online at https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ Access date: February 2016. Fore, Devin. 2008. “The Entomic Age.” Grey Room 33: 26–55. Galison, Peter. 1997. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gibbs, J. Willard. 2014. Elementary Principles in Statistical Mechanics. Mineola, NY: Dover. Gleick, James. 2008. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Penguin. Gould, Stephen Jay. 2006. The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould. New York: Norton. Scale Variance and the Concept of Matter 223 Haldane, J.B.S. 1991. “On Being the Right Size.” The Oxford Book of Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hansen, Mark B.N. 2015. Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First Century Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in an Age of Empire. New York: Penguin. Harman, Graham. 2009. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: re.press. Harman, Graham. 2011. “Realism without Materialism.” SubStance40 (2): 52–72. Harman, Graham. 2016. Immaterialism. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Heise, Ursula. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. New York: Oxford University Press. Hird, Myra. 2009. “Feminist Engagements with Matter.” Feminist Studies 35.2: 330–31. Johnston, Adrian. 2013a. Prolegomena to Any Future Future Materialism: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Johnston, Adrian. 2013b. “Interview with Adrian Johnston on Transcendental Materialism.” Society and Space. November 2015. Available online at http://soci- etyandspace.org/2013/10/07/on-4/ Kim, Jaegwon. 1999. “Making Sense of Emergence.” Philosophical Studies 95.1: 3–36. Latour, Bruno. 1988. The Pasteurization of France. Translated by Alan Sheridan and John Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von. 1965. Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays. Translated by Paul Schrecker and Anne Martin Schrecker. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Levin, Simon. 1992. “Pattern and Scale in Ecology.” Ecology 73.6: 1943–67. Lucretius. On the Nature of Things. 50 B.C.E. Translated by William Ellery Leonard. The Internet Classics Archive. Available online at http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/ nature_things.6.vi.html (accessed 15 January 2016). Mandelbrot, Benoit. 1982. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. New York: W. H. Freeman. Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan. 2003. Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species. New York: Basic Books. Marston, Sallie A. et al. 2005. “Human Geography Without Scale.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30.4: 416–32. McFadden, Johnjoe and Jim Al-Khalili. 2014. Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology. New York: Crown. Milburn, Colin. 2008. Nanovision: Engineering the Future. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mody, Cyrus. 2011. Instrumental Community: Probe Microscopy and the Path to Nanotechnology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology without Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. O’Connell, A.D. et al. 2010. “Quantum Ground State and Single Phonon Control of a Mechanical Resonator.” Nature 464: 697–703. 224 Woods Polyansky, Boris Kozo. 2010. Symbiogenesis. Translated by Victor Fet. Edited by Victor Fet and Lynn Margulis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Roof, Judith. 2007. The Poetics of DNA. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Schmidt-Nielsen, Knut. 1984. Scaling: Why Is Animal Size So Important? New York: Cambridge University Press. Schneider, David. 2001. “The Rise of the Concept of Scale in Ecology.” BioScience One 51.7: 545–53. Thalos, Mariam. 2013. Without Hierarchy: The Scale Freedom of the Universe. New York: Oxford University Press. Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth. 1917. On Growth and Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in the Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Van Gardingen, P. R. et al. 1997. Scaling Up: From Cell to Landscape. Edited by P. R. Van Gardingen, G. M. Foody, and P. J. Curran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wark, McKenzie. 2015. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. New York: Verso. Wiens, J.A. 1989. “Spatial Scaling in Ecology.” Functional Ecology 3.4: 385–97. Williams, R. John. 2016. “World Futures.” Critical Inquiry 42: 473–546. Wilson, Katherine. 1995. The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Woods, Derek. 2014. “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene.” The Minnesota Review 83: 133–43. Part IV The Politics of Ontology This page intentionally left blank 10 Detachment Theory Agency, Nature, and the Normative Nihilism of New Materialism

Lenny Moss University of Exeter

In an age confronted with an impending threat of cataclysmic climate change provoked, arguably, by rapacious exploitation of natural resources for the exclusive benefit of humans (even if not all humans), there would appear to be ample rational motivation to re-embed human self-understanding within a conception of nature, albeit a transformed conception of nature, no longer limited to the status of a passive resource, but rather re-visioned as the founding wellspring of agency (with all the ethical inferences that may suggest). Following Hegel’s assertion that agency entails taking a posi- tion in a normative field, Detachment Theory endeavours to reconstruct the emergence of normativity in a fully naturalistic fashion without requiring recourse to the metaphysics of Absolute Idealism. Theoretical and critical studies that, at least loosely, have been amalgamated under the heading of “new materialism” have likewise been concerned with the question of natu- ralizing, and massively distributing, the status of agency, but rather less so with explicit questions of normativity. It will be suggested that any diremp- tion between agency and normativity, however inspired by anti-anthropo- centric cautions it may be, will ultimately serve not only to undercut its own agency-expanding objectives but will also fail to meet the test of performa- tive self-consistency. After sketching the naturalist basis of detachment the- ory’s normative standpoint, this chapter will offer a critical assessment of new materialist theorist Karen Barad’s post-humanist project and initiative.

Introduction In previous work1 (to be summarized shortly) I have set out a theory of natu- ral detachment that offers a comprehensive perspective in which normativ- ity can be recognized as an outgrowth of natural processes. In so doing, it is intended that (1) human existence may be recontextualized within a non- reductive naturalism, thereby overcoming even de facto residues of dualism, and (2) that ‘nature’ in turn be revalued as the ultimate well spring of poten- tial agency. Ostensibly, those studies and theorizings that have come to be associated with the intentions of a “new materialism” likewise share the goal of a non-dualistic naturalistic conception of agency; however, there is a difference. The outlook of new materialism has been mediated by a deeply 228 Moss embedded, radical anti-anthropocentrism that treats the denial of any form of agentive privileging of humans as an insulated and untouchable presup- position. Either as a direct consequence, or perhaps as a kind of collat- eral damage, new materialist scholarship seldom, if ever, makes explicit its understanding of the sources of normativity in nature, nor even the grounds of its own normative inclinations. The leitmotif of this paper will be that of challenging the idea that there could be any meaningful conception of natural agency in the absence of a conception of the sources and grounds of natural normativity. New materialism is one among several emerging academic research trends oriented toward non- or even anti-anthropocentric ontologies drawing to a greater or lesser extent, directly or indirectly, on the work of Gilles Deleuze. There is no univocal demarcation as to what counts and what doesn’t count as new materialism, no necessary and sufficient conditions, and yet there are some basic commitments and proclivities that are both frequently espoused and performatively adhered to. I will ultimately focus upon the thinking of a key contributor. The orientation of this chapter will turn on questions about naturalized conceptions of agency and normativity; what does detachment theory have to offer in this regard and is new materialism able to offer a coherent alternative? A more polemical way of putting this would be: does detachment theory in fact succeed in achieving new materialism’s own prin- cipal but unrealized objective? There can be little doubt that “agency” has been a key concept for new materialism, however broadly construed. What makes agency agency? Merely an “activity” that is strictly predictable and determined would not count as “agency” in any interesting way and indeed would have to be akin to the characterization of matter that new materialism wishes to overcome. Nor would relativizing predictability with respect to random motion appear to introduce any interesting sense of “agency.” If new materialism is to suc- ceed in de(anthropo)centering the locus of agency in nature and expand- ing the scope, within the realm of materiality, of what counts as agency, it would surely require more than a definitional fiat to be compelling. Declaring “matter” to be agentive is not enough. The idea of spontaneous activity, in itself, is not a foreign, nor even new, concept within the natural sciences. Radioactive decay, diffusion, and Brownian motion would all be physical examples of spontaneous activity that would not appear to attract meaningful ascriptions of agency. Enzymology is specifically discussed (by enzymologists) with respect to metrics of “activity,” and, as will be elabo- rated below, detachment theory, but not new materialism, will have some- thing specific to say about the agency of enzymes. I will begin by setting out detachment theory’s framework for understanding the source of agency in nature. We will then consider the influential concepts of “intraactive agency” and “agential realism” advanced by new materialist theorist Karen Bard as setting out a putative post-humanist alternative. Detachment Theory 229 The legacy that detachment theory both draws upon and continues to “dialogue with” is one in which Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel are all princi- pal contributors. Non-coincidentally, and significantly, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel are all thinkers who have been marginalized (if not vilified) by the lights of new materialism (as well as by other expositors of new, kindred, post-humanist ontologies). For Hegel, to be an agent means to take a posi- tion in a normative field.2 Taking a position in a normative field is a kind of activity, but not just any activity. Random motion is not taking a posi- tion in a normative field. For Hegel “normative space” is not just any old space; normative space constitutes a different, special order of being. It is only within the context of normative space that one can speak meaningfully about agency. The difference between taking a position in a non-normative physical space and taking a position in normative, physical space, is a differ- ence that makes a difference. It is a difference for Hegel, and for detachment theory, that marks the difference between activity as agency and activity that is not in any meaningful way agentive. The task, the objective, the telos for detachment theory may well be summarized as that of grounding this Hegelian distinction in a naturalist account that meets the warranted demands of contemporary science. There may well be those partisans of a new materialism, or of other kindred new, “post-humanist” ontologies, who assume that any reference to a “normative space” is tantamount to some form of unacceptable anthropocentrism, but to assume (as opposed to argu- ing) as much would be to beg the question; it would be to treat a conclu- sion as a presupposition that detachment theory specifically rejects. What, then, is a normative space, and how can a normative space be understood in “naturalistic” terms? A normative space is one that is not evaluatively neutral. A normative space is one that lends itself to evaluative distinctions such as better or worse, right or wrong, good or bad, healthy or ill, etc. Whether an electron has an “up” or “down” spin, on the face of it, would not appear to be a normative distinction. How a simple particle responds to a perturbation, whether, for example, by a change in translational or rotational motion, again would not appear to signify a normative distinction. Are there criteria that provide vantage points from which to identify normative distinctions within nature? The two normative focal points that have guided thinking within the tradi- tion of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel have been the concepts of freedom and of flourishing. For Kant, and for Hegel, the idea of freedom, understood as autonomy and self-determination, has unquestionably been a normative anchor of their philosophical systems. For Aristotle, flourishing is norma- tively pivotal, and freedom rather less obviously so. I will however argue that Aristotle’s concept of flourishing provides the sine qua non for both Kant and Hegel’s notions of freedom, and that indeed it is Aristotle who provides the groundwork for an account of both flourishing and freedom as normative focal points of a naturalist account. 230 Moss Finality, Form, and Essentialism The key to Aristotle’s thinking is his concept of “final cause” and, more spe- cifically, the idea that the sine qua non of a living being is precisely that it is its own final cause. With final cause a new dimension, that of value, enters into the landscape of natural causality. With final cause, an event can be “for the sake of something.” For there to be “value” there must be some subject for whom or for which there is value. To be alive is to be as an end-unto- oneself, and as such a subject of value. That which is an end-unto-itself constitutes its own existence as a value it performs. To be self-sustaining, even at its most elementary level, is to perform this value. Causality does not cease to exist with final cause; rather, final cause is part and parcel of the causality of nature. A causal account of, for example, the consumptive degradation of organic material by a living being that does not take account of the assimilation of the energy and matter of said material, for the sake of the continuity of the living being, is an incomplete causal account. It simply fails to adequately explain why what happened, happened. To adequately explain the causal phenomena of the universe one must countenance imma- nent value, which is also to say normativity. Where there is intrinsic finality, where there is a locus of value, there appear implicit distinctions between good and bad, better and worse, healthy and ill. The idea of flourishing, a patently normative concept and one for which Aristotle is well known, emerges as an implication of his causal analysis and becomes a direct segue into a naturalistic ethics. The name “Aristotle” among many contemporaries, especially those of the “post-humanist” persuasion, is often associated with “essentialism” and thereby treated as grounds for pre-emptive dismissal. One may won- der whether this judgment reflects an adequate familiarity with Aristotle’s thinking let alone a careful consideration of the problem space (and possibil- ity space) opened up by his seminal concept of finality. When one begins to flesh out the nature of the entity that is the self-sus- taining subject of its own activity, questions of “essence” inevitably arise. To be an end-in-itself with no qualitative determinations would seem to be an empty and meaningless concept. Just what is it that would be self-­sustaining if the subject of final cause had no definite attributes? On the other end, if the attributes of an entity are strictly and unequivocally determined, and would thus by definition constitute “the essence” of what it meant to be that entity, then the normativity of adherence to that “essential form” would or could overwhelm the normativity of being self-sustaining. For Aristotle, “final cause” and organismic form or “formal cause” are fused together when it comes to the nature of a living being. When we look at these factors closely we see that they must not only be fused together but also exist in a reciprocal balance. There is much at stake in the nature of this balance, with perhaps far more need for nuance and subtlety than is generally recognized. In the course of what follows, I invite the reader to consider, en passant, Detachment Theory 231 whether some of the associations of Aristotle with “essentialism” may be due to a hasty or superficial encounter with the problem space that Aristotle was dealing with. There are many ways of “knowing,” but that manner of knowing we call a “science” involves generalizations and extrapolations. In his Parts of Animals3 Aristotle (1975) set forth the first systematic treatment of animal anatomy and physiology. The interplay, the balance, between final and for- mal cause was the conceptual breakthrough and guiding framework that enabled Aristotle to produce the first comprehensive science of life. Strictly speaking, all individuals are unique, even if just in subtle ways, but in order to formulate a science of anatomy and physiology (a treatise on the “parts of animals”) some individual differences must at least be provisionally brack- eted. Aristotle characterized forms of life, meaning how a creature flourishes in its habitat, and correlated this with features of its anatomy. If two types of animals, two forms of life, share much in common but also differ in some distinctive way in their environmental relations, i.e., with respect to food, motility, reproductive frequencies, etc., and if there also appears to be a cor- responding variation in some aspect of their anatomy, such as its dentition, the structure of its stomach or of its limbs, then Aristotle would make an inference about the function of that part of the anatomy, assuming that the difference in structure pertained to the difference in function. Function, a patently normative term, and the key concept in any science of physiology, presupposes a form of life that is an end-in-itself. A function is a function for something and that something is a form of life that is an end-in-itself. In order to establish a baseline understanding of structure-function rela- tionships in organisms, Aristotle had to extrapolate from the characteristics shared by multiple members of a species, and bracket individual variations in doing so. But, for Aristotle, and normatively speaking, the individual always comes first. Deviation of some aspect of a part from a species aver- age would not constitute an aberration unless it was associated with some decline in the flourishing of the individual animal. To normatively privilege a species average over an individual’s well-being would constitute an over- whelming of final cause by formal cause and would indeed be tantamount to essentialism. Pace essentialist mischaracterizations, Aristotle appreciated that individual organisms, by virtue of their finality, their end-in-itself-ness, would, and should, alter their formal properties as needed, in order to adapt to contingent changes in circumstance.4 (In recognizing, however, why the formal properties also cannot change indefinitely one begins to grasp the delicate balance of Aristotle’s Form/Finality relation.) The end-in-itself char- acter of living beings was likewise central to Aristotle’s inquiry into the logic of “fundamental substance,” which lends further clarity in address- ing suspicions of essentialism. In his Categories,5 Aristotle (2002) reasoned that that which can sustain its identity while entertaining different, even mutually exclusive, formal characteristics (at different times) is more fun- damental than that which cannot. That, for example, an organism can be 232 Moss pale in one instant and flush in another, and yet still retain its identity, is one such example. This line of reasoning led Aristotle to the conclusion that the most fundamental substances in nature are individual organisms, with his exemplars being “Socrates the man” and “Bucephalus the horse.” Aristotle couldn’t have been clearer in his Categories that it was individual organisms that were “primary substances” and not species. Aristotle may have used species-level consistencies as a pragmatic point of departure, as a methodological stepping stone in his studies, but when it comes to his ontol- ogy it is the individual that is primary and the species level that is merely an extrapolation and thus a “secondary substance.” Individuals, as the funda- mental ends-in-themselves, are not ontologically/normatively beholden to the species. The shoe is on the other foot. With respect to criteria for flourishing, Aristotle must again help himself to observations at the level of the species and yet it is the individual, not the species, that is susceptible, or not, to flourishing. To flourish is to excel at what is one’s greatest good, the identification of which again involves the subtleties of the reciprocal form and finality relation. For non-human, ani- mal species this will involve something concrete, like the ability of a pelican to swoop down from the sky to snare a fish in the sea. For humans, however, a more abstract move is made. Rather than designating some particular structure/function relation as the defining trait of being human, a move that would certainly attract charges of essentialism, Aristotle designated a more abstract capacity, that of “reason” or “rationality,” as the highest good of the human animal. The ability to catch a fish can easily be seen to pertain to the logos of being an end-in-oneself. It speaks to both form and finality. “Reason” does so as well, but at a different level of abstraction. To excel in reason is to excel in the capacity of making the right choices with respect to one’s status as an end-in-oneself. It is, in effect, an abstractive move, taking the idea of an immanent telos and making the capacity to be the agent that chooses how to best realize one’s telos, the telos. I will go on to argue that it is exactly the continuation and further reflective abstraction from the con- cept of final cause that lays the groundwork for Kant and Hegel’s freedom- oriented normative frameworks.

Final Cause, Freedom, and Normativity For Aristotle, and for Hegel, reason is deeply embedded in the practical fab- ric of socially enmeshed daily life and in this respect Kant may appear to be out of step and an outlier with his more individualistic view, and yet Kant is the crucial intermediary between the two. It is only by way of Kant’s critical turn that the virtues of Aristotle’s embodied and embedded reason can, at another level of abstraction, lead to Hegel’s realization of freedom. The identification of normativity within nature by way of Aristotle’s characterization of the relationship of formal and final cause within the liv- ing organism can (to borrow some linguistic style from Hegel) be further Detachment Theory 233 specified as a “normativity-in-itself.” Detachment theory will endeavour to expand and further articulate the characterization of normativity-in-itself in nature. In characterizing reason as the highest good of the human animal, Aristotle countenances a rupture in the continuity of nature, a rupture that detachment theory, following the tradition of philosophical anthropology, will see differently than Aristotle. In his ethics, Aristotle made the move from a normativity-in-itself in natural life forms to the beginning of a nor- mativity-for-itself in the valorization of various virtues as constituting the right kind of embodiment of reason in the pursuit of practical human life. But on what basis does one come to know just what are the truly “virtuous” ways of embodying reason in one’s practical disposition to act? The Greeks, including Aristotle, were as yet only at the cusp of moving beyond traditional ethnocentrism. There was no concept of “humanity” as such as a normative universal. Being Greek was good and being a barbarian was bad—–and yet they could recognize that some “barbarians” were more “Greek” than some Greeks.6 Aristotle’s normative ethics were a kind of half-way house between the implicit normativity resident in Greek Athenian culture and society and a reflectively reconstructed normativity-for-itself which can begin to abstract from the facticity of what happens to be Athenian to what can be recom- mended about being Athenian on the basis of warrants that can at least be sifted out of the context as the best that the normative context has to offer. Can the very idea of being an end-in-oneself, an idea that I claim has strong naturalistic warrant, provide the basis of a normativity that does not take on board norms that only just happen to be the case within a given socio-cultural context, but rather draws upon nothing other than the resources immanent in the idea itself? My claim is that this is exactly the crux of Kant’s moral philosophy. For Kant, the normativity-in-itself, of an end-in-itself, can only become normativity-for-itself in a state of freedom, whereby the implications of being an end-unto-oneself are reflectively appro- priated, as an “act of self-legislation” as the “moral law.” To recognize one- self as a self-recognizing end-in-oneself and as thereby a free being worthy of recognition as such necessarily means recognizing any such being of equal status as an end-unto-herself as worthy of exactly the same recognition. To fail to do so, to fail to confer equal standing, equal regard, equal recognition for all those whose warrant is equivalent to one’s own claim, is to fail to be rational. Conversely, being rational, that is having one’s will determined by nothing but the implications of that reflection on being an end-in-oneself whose self-understanding of being such confers a rational entitlement to recognition, requires and presupposes a radical break with empirical causal- ity. Aristotle’s cosmos was permissive to the idea that purposes are natural and immanent within nature. Aristotle didn’t need to introduce a notion of freedom as a radical departure from the continuity of nature. For Kant, the logos of being-an-end-in-oneself leading to a reflective appropriation of the normativity immanent in this status that can then guide the execution of practical life required a radical transition from empirical causality to the 234 Moss causality of freedom, i.e., to a separate dimension in which the “force” of reason becomes the cause, and only cause, of action. There is a profound ambivalence (issuing into an intractable dualism) in Kant’s relationship to questions of nature and normativity. On the one hand, the normativity of freedom in Kant resonates with a suggestively nat- uralistic conception of intrinsic finality, and yet on the other hand its reali- zation required, for Kant, an anti-naturalistic turn. Kant’s ambivalence can also be seen in his treatment of “teleological judgment,” both with respect to biological understanding and his understanding of the aesthetic experi- ence of beauty. With respect to the former, Kant held that we have no choice but to grasp the nature of a living “organized” being in terms of its intrinsic finality, its end-in-itself-ness, and yet held that we must consider this to be a subjective concept. I will take a bit of license in elucidating this view as being tantamount to saying (again borrowing Hegel’s idiom) that only by virtue of being agents who have grasped normativity-for-itself (as the cau- sality of freedom) can we grasp the normativity-in-itself of the “organized,” i.e., living, being, but in so doing we are borrowing a perspective that we are not warranted to project back onto other creatures as an “objective” concept. Likewise, when we experience beauty in nature, it elicits a sense of our own “purposiveness,” our own intrinsic finality. It allows us to feel that which we can’t “objectively” grasp by empirical means. And the experience of “beauty,” which is fundamentally an experience of nature, is at once a “sign” of the good. Nature for Kant is both, and ineluctably so, an intrinsic source of the normativity of the end-in-itself, and yet also not a source of normativity that we can “objectively” know, but only subjectively by way of our special status as “supersensible” beings who can act and experience ourselves within the normative realm of freedom.7 Freedom can only become a normative focal point within nature and nature can only become a normative well spring for humans if Kant’s dual- ism, if his discontinuity between the realms of sensible empirical nature and that of “supersensible” freedom can be overcome. Hegel, detachment theory, and new materialism all aspire to grasp a single realm of being that is both natural and agentive. I will argue that Hegel and detachment theory do so by way of preserving and further developing the normative resources in Aristotle and Kant’s concepts of flourishing and of freedom, while new materialism, in eschewing this legacy and offering no adequate alternative, can only posit a thin, normatively vacuous ontology, overflowing with dif- ferences but in which no difference makes a difference. Many brilliant volumes (and entire academic careers) have been dedi- cated to reconstructing the movement of thought from Kant to Hegel and I can’t even begin to attempt to do justice to that literature in what follows. Hegel has been characterized by some as “Aristotle in search of Freedom,”8 a characterization exhibiting much elective affinity with the outlook spring- ing from detachment theory. For present purposes, it will suffice to offer a simple “toy model” focused upon the question of how Hegel could indeed Detachment Theory 235 preserve the Aristotelian anchor of natural normativity in intrinsic final cause, while overcoming Kant’s dualism of empirical versus supersensible nature, and yet without sacrificing the advances Kant made in accommodat- ing the post-Aristotelian metaphysical framework of the modern, Western world. In the Greek understanding of the cosmos within which Aristotle could claim to find purpose to be intrinsic to fundamental substance, and thus to nature as such, there is no call to raise “freedom” to the level of a deep imperative. Freedom from what? Certainly not from one’s own natu- ral purpose. Freedom as an ethical imperative would only make sense in terms of overcoming contingent impediments to the realization of one’s best purposes, not as a fundamental tension related to the fabric of the universe as such. For Kant, by contrast, in the wake of the Scientific Revolution, the combined goals of at once securing the epistemic warrants of the Newtonian worldview (against corrosive skepticism) while also defining and securing the imperative of moral responsibility (against natural determinism) meant elevating “freedom” to a pre-eminent status. At the end of the day, however, Kant could not do this within the confines of a non-dualistic ontology. While Kant did put forward a philosophy of history that surely had a sig- nificant influence on Hegel’s thinking, and Kant’s philosophy of history was teleologically structured in a certain way, freedom was not understood as a historical or developmental achievement but rather as a transcendental dis- covery of reason. Hegel departed from Kant principally in the direction of embedding humans back into nature (or at least into “the Absolute”) and in understanding freedom as a developmental, historical, and socially mediated achievement. Where Kant was able to move beyond the ethnocentric limits of Aristotle’s normative framework, but only by conferring upon humans a largely atemporal, transcendental status as beings apart from nature, Hegel’s principal gambit was to bring the resources latent in Aristotelian final cause to bear upon nature, or all being, as a whole. Aristotle did not have a need for a strong concept of freedom. Kant very much had a need for a strong concept of freedom but it involved a breaking away from nature, a funda- mental separation of the realms of freedom and that of natural determinism. By applying the Aristotelian concept of finality, of being an end-in-itself, not just to humans, and not just to living beings, but to all of “being,” or as Hegel would say “the Absolute,” Hegel could relocate freedom as an imma- nent possibility within nature. Freedom, for Hegel, then becomes self-deter- mination, and self-determination is a progressive historical/developmental achievement. This idea, in effect, becomes the crux of Hegel’s somewhat notorious metaphysics. The logos of an end-in-itself, which for Kant leads to the moral law, for Hegel is invested in all of being and works itself out, not transcendentally, but in real time through a dialectical movement of imma- nent tensions and overcomings (“negations” and “negations of negations”) coursing through the entirety of natural and human history. This immanent logos is what Hegel refers to as the “Concept” or the “Idea” and inas- much as the “Absolute” is always already driven by its “Concept,” Hegel’s 236 Moss philosophy is a form of “Absolute idealism.” With Hegel, the end-in-itself returns to nature (albeit a transformed nature) and brings freedom, under- stood as self-determination, with it. Freedom, in its fullest manifestation, is not just self-determination in-itself, but a reflective, self-understood self- determination for-itself. Reason is not an “other” to nature, not an escape from nature, but is immanent in nature as the logos of an end-in-itself mov- ing inexorably from an end-in-itself to an end-for-itself.9 Beginning, not with Kant’s autonomous individual rationally reflect- ing upon the dictates of reason, but rather with the “absolute” moving toward freedom as self-determination, the realization of freedom does not culminate in the autonomous individual but rather in the reciprocal rela- tionship of recognition between the individual and the ethical community (Sittlichkeit) in which she is embedded. It is at the level of the Sittlichkeit that the “concept,” the working out of the implications of the end-in-itself orientation immanent in the “absolute,” comes to full fruition. The relation- ship of mutual recognition between the individual and the institutions of the Sittlichkeit is structured by the logos of the “concept.” Individuals recognize their own self-determination in the institutions of the Sittlichkeit and the institutions in turn recognize the self-determination of the individual. But why only humans and human institutions when it was all of being that entered into Hegel’s dialectic of self-determination? Is there not perhaps the opportunity to go beyond Hegel, and beyond anthropocentrism, and yet from within Hegel? Hegel has arguably brought freedom into the ambit of nature. Freedom, understood as progressive self-determination, can struc- ture a normative field and give meaning and significance to designations of agency. Detachment theory did not stem from Hegel but increasingly finds an elective affinity with the Hegelian outlook. Taken together, detachment theory can confer empirical currency and credibility onto what otherwise is often written off as outmoded metaphysics. Detachment theory is also in a position to go beyond Hegel in expanding the franchise of “agency” in nature, albeit without sacrificing the dimension of normativity, and the abil- ity to nuance normativity, that enables agency to be a meaningful category.

Detachment, Normativity, and Agency What is natural detachment? A universe in which a pulse of energy rip- ples through all that exists with little or no resistance would exhibit a very low level of detachment. Any bit of resistance, any ability to buffer oneself against ambient winds, constitutes some level of detachment. All detach- ment is partial. All detachment signifies some relative level, even if infinitesi- mal, of autonomy. The pre-Big Bang “cosmic egg,” as we understand it, had no detachment. All existence was one point of infinitesimal space and infinite density. The Big Bang was an explosion of detachment. Time and space detached (relativ- istically). Pure energy is less detached than anything we would call matter. Detachment Theory 237 The condensation of energy into matter is an act of detachment. A particle, such as an electron that has even a minute rest mass, is more detached than that, such as a photon, which lacks any rest mass. Anything with a rest mass creates some well within space-time. That which creates a well within space- time is more detached than that which does not. A subatomic particle, such as an electron, that only has a probabilistic density distribution in space, is less detached than a particle, such as a neutron, that has a discrete position in space. Physicists describe the possibility space, the “state space,” of an entity in terms of its “degrees of freedom.” The more degrees of freedom the broader the possibility space. To have more degrees of freedom is to be more detached than to have fewer degrees of freedom. A single atom can respond to a perturbation (such as being hit by a photon) in terms of its five degrees of freedom (it can translate along three axes, it can rotate or it can elevate the energy level of an electron). A simple bi-atomic molecule, such as O2 (two oxygen atoms with a covalent double bond between them), adds a sixth degree of freedom (it can vibrate along the axis of its covalent bond). How an atom or bi-atomic molecule responds to a perturbation in one instance does not bias the chances of how it responds to a perturba- tion in a subsequent instance. In each case the response is independent and stochastic. We describe as being “historical” a sequence of events in which, at least in retrospect, one can discern a connection between the events and the sense in which one event has led to or prefigured the possibility of the subsequent event. That which is historical has a directionality in time. A series of perturbation events at the atomic or bi-atomic molecular level, as described above, does not have a history and does not have a directional- ity in time. That which can be said to have a history stands out against the background of that which doesn’t. It constitutes a new level of self-identity, a new level of relative autonomy, a new level of detachment. With a mol- ecule even as small as the four-carbon, saturated hydro-carbon butane (a gas under “standard temperature and pressure [STP]”), something new comes onto the scene. In addition to all the degrees of freedom previously accorded to the bi-atomic molecule, butane can also undergo, in response to a per- turbation, a structural mutation or “isomerization,” transitioning from a straight chain to a branch chain, referred to as isobutane. As this transition is relatively stable and will in fact alter or bias the possibilities for subse- quent transitions, a butane molecule can be said to begin to be susceptible to a rudimentary history and thus mark a new level of detachment. Detachment theory suggests that “nature explores greater levels of detach- ment” and that at increasingly higher levels of detachment this increasingly amounts to moving toward the capacity for normative self-determination. In relation to new materialism, and other kindred expressions of post-human- ist new ontologies, and in concert with Hegel, detachment theory holds that ascriptions of agency can only be meaningful in a normative context. Most, if not all, contemporary interpreters of Hegel, however, understand 238 Moss normativity as only beginning with spoken language. The desideratum of detachment theory is to locate and grasp the movement within nature toward normativity and the conditions for freedom as normative self-determination. Detachment theory claims the resources to be able to expand the “fran- chise” of agency in nature without rendering the very concept meaningless. When and where does normativity, and thereby some manner of agency, begin? If, as Hegel suggests, the hallmark of agency is the taking up of a position in a normative field then there must be something distinctive about a normative field. Movement in a normative field must be different from movement in a non-normative field. To be a normative field there must be differences of value at issue and such differences must have some conse- quences with respect to the actions that come to pass. For value to be at play in determining the actions that occur there must be an even larger space of prerogatives, of “degrees of freedom,” than is the case for the simple atoms and molecules previously discussed. This however is by no means to reduce normativity to merely a quantitative measure of complexity. The chief impediment to elaborating a naturalized understanding of normativity is a surprisingly tenacious, albeit metaphysically outdated, concept of free- dom that is refractory to any notion of causality. We can begin to go beyond this roadblock by taking a cue from Kant. Kant spoke of the “causality” of freedom, by which he meant that an action was determined by reason. The critical distinction was not between causality versus non-causality but between two kinds of causality. Reason, for Kant, constituted a different kind of space of causality than the world of Newtonian mechanisms that he took to be the limits of objectively cognizable natural causation. As a frame- work of causation reason is built differently to Newtonian mechanism; its pushes and pulls, unlike that of Newtonian mechanism, are normatively structured. Kant of course was not able to ground the causality of reason in a monistic account of nature, so he can’t be said to have naturalized norma- tivity. For Aristotle, normativity becomes a causal force as our feelings, per- ceptions, implicit judgments, and such become developmentally shaped by our normative cultural environment and embedded in our flesh and bones. Normativity is part of our “nature” but distinct in its contingency and mal- leability. The causal pushes and pulls of normativity for Aristotle thereby constitute a “second nature.” John McDowell would be one of the more prominent contemporary thinkers who continue to follow Aristotle in seek- ing to ground his understanding of normativity in a conception of second nature.10 The limitation however of this approach is that “second nature” only seems to happen for humans. If second nature is confined to humans then some manner of dualism is still in force. Perhaps the idea of a second nature would be better understood as a placeholder waiting for a sufficiently capacious and nuanced view that can expand the reach of “normative cau- sation” in “first nature” without jettisoning any sense of what may be dis- tinctive about normative causation in the human world. Exactly such is the intention of detachment theory. Detachment Theory 239 So again, when and where does normativity begin in nature? I will begin answering this question by moving from the small organic (i.e., “reduced” carbon-based) molecule butane to the class of comparatively large organic so-called “macro-molecules” we call “proteins” and from there to the sub- class of proteins we call “enzymes.” In doing so however, we need to be aware that we are moving from the medium of a gas to that of “soft con- densed matter” and specifically an aqueous system. Given that we physically model the nature of a gas based upon the idealizing assumption of a lack of interaction between particles other than random collisions, it is virtu- ally a tautological truth that gases cannot be spaces of normative causality. Inasmuch as the entire universe of normative interactions that we have any familiarity with occurs within the realm of aqueous-based soft condensed matter (or perhaps in artifacts produced by such) it will be of interest to consider why that may be the case. Despite the simple structure of the single water molecule, the physics and chemistry of water are highly complex and far from fully understood. As a form of soft condensed matter in itself, and under “standard conditions,” water oscillates between more solid-like and more fluid-like structure in an ongoing fashion (in a sense “anticipating” the “gel-sol” oscillations of pro- toplasmic tissue). Even at the simplest descriptive level, water involves an ongoing interplay of stronger (covalent) and weaker (hydrogen bond) inter- actions and each of these can rapidly shift into the other. The combination of strong and weak interactions allows for combinations of coherence and flexibility that would not be found in either purely solid or purely gaseous states of matter. In phenomena such as capillary action (moving up a capil- lary tube against gravity) and the formation of droplets on a non- or weakly polar surface, water spontaneously “behaves” in a non-Newtonian fashion. In the latter case, so-called “hydrophobic effects” entail reducing surface-to- volume ratio thus preserving internal organizational degrees of freedom. If we treat normativity as an “a-causal” phenomenon then we relegate it to a supernatural realm. If it is not supernatural then it is causal but it cannot be merely the causality of Newtonian mechanism. While it would be too far a stretch to say that normativity begins in liquid water, I think it would not be a stretch at all to suggest that the complexly interactive chemistry of water, with its dynamic interplay between flexibility and structure, constitutes a leap into a new space of self-organizing possibilities and thus a gateway into the possibility of normative causation. For whatever it’s worth (and I don’t think we know) we might recall in this regard that millions if not billions of dollars are spent worldwide every year on a therapeutic practice (i.e., homeopathy) that turns on a conception of causation frequently referred to as “the memory of water.” Proteins are, like butane (but not isobutane), generally linear chains, albeit very large linear chains, but instead of hydrogen-“saturated” ­carbon as the repeating unit (as in butane) the repeating unit is one of twenty “amino acids” which, in addition to carbon and hydrogen, will also contain oxygen 240 Moss and nitrogen (in so-called “carboxyl” and “amino” groups) and sometimes also sulfur. These additional elements provide for significant increases in the ways in which each part of a protein may interact with other parts of the protein, with water, and with any and all other material substances that may be present in the aqueous environment. Owing to their far greater size and degree of chemical complexity, proteins enjoy many more qualitative degrees of freedom than a small hydrocarbon such as butane, based on their ability to fold back upon themselves in many different ways. It should be kept in mind that protein folding is always about protein interactions in and with water (and possibly other proteins, ions, and so forth). Typically, an enzyme is a protein that assumes a globular, three-dimensional “confor- mation.” The functionality of an enzyme as a catalyst is dependent upon its having the “right” conformation, but crucially, for the purposes of our present argument, the conformation of a protein is never more narrowly or finally determined than its achieving one of many possible “metasta- ble” states. Uncontroversially, life, as we know it, is fully dependent upon the presence of many enzymes. If neither Newtonian laws of motion nor even thermodynamic laws strictly determine the conformational state of an enzyme then is it possible that some form of normativity becomes part of any fully adequate explanation? An enzyme not only must assume a certain dynamic state in order to serve as a chemical catalyst but it also must rap- idly return to that conformational state at the end of that catalytic cycle. These are not random processes. Enzymes in this sense “behave” as if they were adhering to a norm. Taken in abstractive isolation, one might say that enzymes are proto-normative in the sense of exploring a normative possibil- ity space. The question would then be what value or values could orient a normative space? Owing to the cumulative systematic (or proto-systematic) degrees of freedom of a possible ensemble of proteins and of water itself, there lies the possibility of an emergent transition to a cooperative, self- sustaining dynamic regime. Such would (and presumably has) constituted a significant new level of natural detachment, a level constituting a nascent form of self-determination. The ostensible norm-guided activity of constitu- tive enzymes would then be oriented to the emergent immanent value of sus- taining the self-organizing regime (in relation to which each enzyme became both cause and effect). Darwinian descent with modification, we should be clear, doesn’t “explain,” but always already must presuppose the existence of such a self-value-emergent level of natural detachment. A nascent normativity-in-itself emerges when molecules with degrees of freedom no less than that of protein-based enzymes begin to enter into the kind of cooperative interaction Kant characterized as exhibiting “circular causality.” Detachment theory locates the emergence and further elabo- ration of normativity on a natural continuum. With the emergence of a nascent normativity-in-itself, nature explores greater levels of detachment by way of exploring incremental increases in normative self-determination. Reconstructed in detachment theoretic terms, Hegel’s dialectics and telos of Detachment Theory 241 freedom as self-reflective self-determination can be refreshed and renewed in dialogue with contemporary natural and social sciences. In detachment the- oretical terms, and in accord with a further naturalization of Hegel’s insight, when, for example, two organisms, be they aquatic single-celled protists, or a massive tree and a multicellular soil fungus, enter into a symbiotic association, they spontaneously reconstitute their normative regime (i.e., the conditions of their mutual flourishing) and as such can be deemed to be exerting agency, i.e., taking a position in a normative field. Detachment the- ory provides the resources for expanding the franchise of agency beyond the bounds of the human (and indeed also within the bounds of the human) yet without collapsing into a flat ontology that blurs all nuance and distinction. Protists and pine trees can be accorded a measure of agency by detachment theory without requiring anything like conscious intent yet also without losing sight of the metric of detachment that would distinguish them from balloons on the one side and baboons on the other.

The Deleuzian Turn and Barad’s New Materialism For some, the thinking of Gilles Deleuze marks a new horizon, a point of no return, and a veritable Kuhnian revolution, in the history of metaphysics. As in the classic (if frequently contested) Kuhnian model, the “Deleuzian Revolution” introduces a new vocabulary, and/or changes the meaning of old terms and thereby redefines the “playing field” itself. Converts to the revolution do not so much argue point with the old subject-centered ontolo- gies as extend the reach of what can be articulated in the new lexicon. As a new horizon, younger generations of scholars become socialized into being Deleuzians in-themselves, taking up the revolution’s new values, passively, with their academic mother’s milk. For Kuhn, conditions become ripe for a revolution when a malaise, feelings of disenchantment with the puzzle-solv- ing fecundity of the old paradigm, increasingly sets in and festers. The new paradigm changes what counts as the relevant questions and thus the criteria for successful puzzle-solving. I can’t help but wonder whether the malaise that has prompted the ever-growing embrace of the Deleuzian revolution has been a discouragement with our ability to practically solve “normative puzzles” concerning social justice, human freedom, and human flourishing. Our interest at present will be to sketch a general picture of the Deleuzian standpoint as a contextual backdrop for situating new materialism in gen- eral and new materialist theorist Karen Barad’s work in particular. I would suggest, with this purpose in mind, that we begin by conceiving of Deleuze as opening a path toward a radicalized Lebensphilosophie, i.e., one in which the line between life and non-life has become blurred. Where Nietzsche (a strong influence on Deleuze) sought to draw normative inferences from the nature of life, the post-Deleuzians move toward an even broader and more abstract field from which valid normative inferences must be made. For Deleuze, the overarching commitment is toward a rejection of the 242 Moss philosophy of self-same identity. Thinking, for Deleuze, must learn to give up its reliance upon fundamental beings, about beings whose existence is presupposed in all predication and representation. Being, for Deleuze, does not precede becoming; rather, the opposite is the case. In the spirit of a radicalized post-structuralism, it is the field of difference that precedes any identity and is the productive source of such, but pace and beyond struc- turalism there is no structure either that has a stable substantive charac- ter. Deleuze’s basic concepts are more abstract. All is within the “plane of immanence” for Deleuze, which means that there is no being which prefig- ures the ongoing productive flux of difference. The plane of immanence is a reservoir of virtual possibility, animated by variable “intensities,” in rela- tion to which there is no outside, no external standpoint. Thinking occurs within the plane of immanence and is itself a formation of such. Worlds of intelligibility arise, not as objects perceived by subjects but as “folds” within the plane of immanence. Thinking does not represent, it participates in the production of actualities. In this sense thinking itself takes on an immanent ethical burden but what are its normative guideposts? The philosopher is tasked with thinking innovatively, with opening up, as opposed to foreclos- ing, new possibilities.11 Where Deleuze (in the manner of a Lebensphilosopher, and unlike new materialists), speaks on behalf of life, his rejection of all forms of self-­ identity, and thereby finality, lead to an inevitable blurring of life/non-life distinctions. In the absence of any form of finality, the coming together of parts becomes “machinic.” In the absence of finality, there is no “need” as need would suggest a prior subject that has requirements and can expe- rience lack. Deleuze’s life-philosophy thus must become one in which the forces of life are all pervasive as there can’t be a clear boundary before the fact between life and non-life. “Becomings” must be driven by some- thing and that something is deemed to be “desire.” Connections are made, driven by desire. If as Deleuze suggests living beings are desiring machines, where is the distinction between living and non-living? The productivity of difference is inflected by the virtual play of intensities. Affects for Deleuze prefigure subjects that are affected. “Desire” is pervasive and productive. Living-beings, including humans, we could concede, may well be ongoing, dynamic fields of possibility, but need this entail the radical exclusion of beings that constitute themselves as self-sustaining ends-unto-themselves? If all beings are condensations from fields of possibility then those forces that connect and territorialize can’t be segregated into the living and non-living domains that they first bring into being. But when we conceive of “inten- sities,” “affects,” and “desire,” surely we are borrowing, phenomenolog- ically, from the realm of human subjectivity. In the plane of immanence somehow it seems that human subjectivity, or something that looks a whole lot like it, is always already in the house. If indeed the blurring of boundaries between the living and the non- living is an unintended collateral effect of Deleuze’s particular style of Detachment Theory 243 Lebensphilosophie it has become very much the deliberate and intended point of departure for new materialism.12 It will be instructive to consider to what extent new materialism simply is an extension, perhaps even an application, of certain provocations in Deleuze. As a former theoretical physicist, Karen Barad holds a special status among new materialists. As perhaps the sole contributor to new materialism with solid scientific creden- tials, she provides, for many, a kind of anchor of credibility for a movement that proclaims itself to be espousing the attributes of matter. For Barad the breakthrough insight into the nature of agency comes with Niels Bohr’s dis- covery that there can be no clear demarcation between the observer and the observed at the level of quantum physics. For Barad, the laboratory of the quantum physicist has become the theater of Deleuze’s plane of immanence. It is where phenomena present themselves in their most basic form and the form they take is that of “intraaction.” The concept of intraaction is the key concept in Barad’s work and arguably her key innovation. By downgrading the agentive status of the quantum physicist from “inter-actor” to “intra- actor” and implying mutatis mutandis that this holds for all human activ- ity, she simultaneously assures that there are no self-same agentive subjects “before the fact” and yet also, through failing to secure an autochthonous source of agency from within “matter,” assures that there must always be a not-yet human in any picture of agency she can provide. From a detachment theoretic point of view, the very low level of detachment of a subatomic particle will result in its “entanglement” with an observer in a way that is not necessarily the case with, for example, a rocky serpentine outcrop- ping, a mountain lion or, as we will see, a brittlestar. But for Barad (2007), whose basic concepts do not scale, the experience of the quantum physicist is adequate and sufficient for full-on ontological extrapolation.

Intra-actions are not the result of human interventions; rather “humans” themselves emerge through specific intra-actions. And measurements are not mere laboratory manipulations but causal intra-actions of the world in differential becoming. This means that quantum theory has something to say about the ontology of the world, of that world of which we are a part—not as spectator, not as pure cause, not as mere effect. (352)

Much of Barad’s account brings together claims that are neither new nor controversial, with very strong, perhaps even shocking claims, with the suggestion, but only the suggestion, that the latter follow from the for- mer. Surely, we all agree that quantum mechanics has something to say about the ontology of the world. It is also long since well established (and well known among scientists themselves) that the outcome of scien- tific research seldom reflects the intended expectations of the investiga- tors at the commencement of the experiment but rather constitute ex post 244 Moss facto reconstructions of a course of investigations whereby unexpected outcomes lead to a reinterpretation of what was being asked to begin with. In this sense, it may well be perspicuous to introduce a notion such as “intraaction” to describe the encounters that ensue in the laboratory setting. However, to suggest that there is any plausible sense in which the human investigator herself only first comes into being at the end of the paper would beg credulity, to say the least. This ostensibly overblown thesis about the intra-active emergence of the human is on some level expressive of the more radical side of the Deleuzian paradigm. The prob- lem may pertain to questions of scale and to a dilemma that Barad never acknowledges. Using the experience of the quantum physicist, and the associated concept of intraaction, as a kind of concretized model for the generative activity of the Deleuzian plane of immanence can be under- stood in two different ways, each accountable to a different set of implica- tions. If it is meant to flesh out in a very broad way what might be meant by a plane of immanence (and thus not meant to suggest that humans are first constituted in the course of laboratory intraactions) then we are owed an account of how all phenomena are really very much like that of the quantum physics lab, i.e., why should we assume that the quantum lab is a good model, and not just a special case, for grasping no thing less than the nature of reality? The worry would be that Barad has wanted to have it both ways—reaping the benefit of offering a very concrete, even empirical, model for the primacy of intraaction (or Deleuzian becoming) but projected in a more general way, yet without holding herself account- able to the inferences that follow either the broad or the narrow applica- tion. Perhaps another way to express this is to ask whether the timescale of experimentation in the quantum lab, tempting as the proposition may be, is really relevant to the timescale (if any) in which one could plausibly suggest that “‘humans’ themselves emerge through specific intra-actions.” Barad appears, but perhaps only appears, to offer the Deleuzian paradigm a kind of empirical accountability. As the wherewithal for novel becoming in the Deleuzian plane of imma- nence required the redeployment of ostensibly subjective notions of inten- sities, affects and desires, for Barad it is about a primordial intraaction of discourse and matter. Discourse appears to play a role parallel to that of intensities, affects and desires, as an activity, fundamental to any possible becoming, that has been reconceived and relocated from within the realm of human existence to being a prior and irreplaceable precondition for any kind of existence at all, including human.

In summary, the universe is agential intra-activity in its becoming. The pri- mary ontological units are not “things” but phenomena—dynamic topo- logical reconfiguring/entanglements/relationships/(re)articulations. And the primary semantic units are not “words” but material-discursive practices Detachment Theory 245 through which boundaries are constituted. This dynamism is agency. Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world. (Barad 2008, 135)

But what is the meaning of “discourse” that Barad intends? If, as we usu- ally do, we think of discourse as pertaining to language, then we are con- fronted with an interpretative challenge. Barad has wanted to depart from the language-speaks-us brand of post-humanism that characterized much of structuralist and post-structuralist thinking. The whole gist of new material- ism is about moving toward an agentive understanding of materiality. But, for materiality to be agentive it must have properties that materiality as such had not hitherto been granted. Barad’s move is to annex discourse onto materiality, as a kind of basic unity at the root of the universe’s generative activity. But what can this mean? If “discourse” retains its linguistic sense then there would appear to be only two alternatives, either of which would appear to be at odds with Barad’s intent. Either Barad is endorsing a kind of theology in which discourse precedes humanity because it is an expression of God (but then what of the “materiality”) or she is offering a transcenden- tal epistemology that tethers all reality to intra-active performances in which language users, i.e., humans, have been co-participants. While this latter may be an interesting viewpoint to pursue, its performative, constructiv- ist, quasi-idealism would appear to blatantly contradict Barad’s claim to be advancing an “agentive realism.” The alternative then would be to under- stand the meaning of discourse as being broader or other than a specifically linguistic practice and we can get a better handle on what this might be in examining her discussion of the visuality of the brittlestar. The brittlestar, an evolutionary relative of the starfish, Barad recounts, had presented an explanatory challenge to biologists inasmuch as it dis- played the ability to flee from predators and yet appeared to lack the eyes and brain with which to perceive them. In the concluding chapter of her major work, Barad presents a fascinating account of how an “international team of material scientists, theoretical physicists, chemists, and biologists” mostly associated with Bell Labs, came to understand that the brittlestar secretes calcite crystals all over its body which serve as mini lenses focusing light from a certain angle onto an underlying nerve. The whole nerve web of the brittlestar is able to intergrate the inputs from all the crystals and so in effect the whole body of the brittlestar is like the compound eye of an insect (Barad 2007, 369–84). We might meanwhile want to consider how this account squares with Barad’s intraactive ontology. The brittlestar, while relatively simple from a zoological perspective, is immensely more detached than a complex mol- ecule, let alone the subatomic particles of the quantum lab. Barad’s account, we should notice, of the investigation into the visuality of the brittlestar is one of classic scientific discovery. She offers no suggestion of any intraactive coming to be of either the brittlestar or the investigators coursing through 246 Moss the unfolding of this discovery. Rather, her account attests to a progressive epistemic advance from an inferior understanding of the “visuality” of the brittlestar to a superior understanding on the basis of hypothesis formation and hypothesis testing. Barad’s interest in the case of the brittlestar, for pur- poses of advancing her thesis, lies elsewhere and this will bring us back to a clarification of the sense of her use of the concept of “discourse.” For Barad (2007) the brittlestar itself is an exemplar of a non-Cartesian, non-representational fusion of “being and knowing, materiality and intel- ligibility, substance and form …” (375). Reading Barad’s description of the being (and knowing) of the brittlestar it will be difficult not to hear strong normative intonations. Attempting to elucidate the nature of those norma- tive intonations will help in further explicating the difficulties and para- doxes of her thinking.

A brittlestar can change its coloration in response to the available light in its surroundings. When in danger of being captured by one predator or another, a brittlestar will break off the endangered body part (hence its name) and regrow it. The brittlestar is a visualizing system that is constantly changing its geometry and its topology–autonomizing and regenerating its optics in an on-going reworking of its bodily bounda- ries. Its discursive practices—the boundary-drawing practices by which it differentiates itself from the environment with which it intra-acts and by which it makes sense of the world, enabling it to discern a predator, for example—are materially enacted. The brittlestar’s bodily structure is a material agent in what it sees and knows as part of the world’s dynamic engagement in practices of knowing. Similarly, its bodily mate- riality is not a passive, blank surface awaiting the imprint of culture or history to give it meaning or open it to change; its very substance is morphologically active and generative and plays an agentive role in its differential production, its ongoing materialization. That is, its differen- tial materialization is discursive—entailing causal practices reconfigur- ing boundaries and properties that matter to its very existence. (375–76)

Barad’s description is not one of an “intraactor” whose identity first emerges by virtue of the intraaction. Neither the identity of the brittlestar nor that of the predator is contingent upon an intraaction that prefigures their individuation. The sense of discourse disclosed in her description is one that presupposes an entity as an end-in-itself, with a sufficient level of detachment to act on its own behalf. The materiality of self-position- ing, for the sake of sustaining its existence, is a materiality of detachment. To speak of “boundaries and properties that matter to its very existence,” which is what Barad’s concept of discourse presupposes, is to speak of a self-identity that asserts itself. Detachment theory offers a perspective from which degrees of intraaction and interaction can be seen to scale along a Detachment Theory 247 spectrum. In dropping a capturing limb, changing colors to elude a preda- tor, or relocating itself, the brittlestar is at least as much the interactor as the intraactor, yet Barad’s own neo-Deleuzian ontology offers no capacity for any such nuance. Barad’s reference to agency assumes a field of value, i.e., a normative field, but fails to account for it adequately (if at all). In lieu of acknowledging the existence of relatively detached entities that self- constitute normative reference points, Barad smuggles normativity into her pictures under the cover of discourse. The idea that the full-bodied visuality and the capacity to change its embodied positionality makes the brittlestar an excellent exemplar of a materially realized and enacted form of cognizant life is one with which I am in much sympathy. But the idea is not new. Helmuth Plessner, a trained biologist and philosopher, introduced the idea of “positionality” in his 1928 magnum opus precisely as a means of overcoming dualism and forg- ing a vocabulary that is simultaneously materialistic and agentive.13 But unlike Barad, Plessner’s concepts have the ability to scale and to locate human particularity in a non-dualistic and yet distinctive way. Barad is cor- rect in implying that much of human “knowing” is by way of an embodied familiarity and ongoing practical engagement within a dynamic environ- ment. Perhaps we can say that there are both interactive and intraactive aspects in human everyday coping. But is that the extent of it? Is there not also a manner of being/knowing, at a level of detachment, that is in fact distinctively human? Plessner described this in terms of the transition from only being an animate body that positions itself in its relations with its environment, reaching out and drawing back into its center, to that of also “having” a body. To have a body is to be able to see oneself from the point of view of a generalized other and dispose over one’s body. For Plesser we reside in both forms of positionality, a state he referred to as “excentric positionality.” One suspects, however, that any reference to a distinctively human way of being, whatever the costs may be, have become taboo within the post-humanist, neo-Deleuzian normative horizon. As with Deleuze’s plane of immanence, Barad’s concepts of intraaction and agential realism are meant to be all-inclusive; deep truths about the nature of reality. Given the immodest scope, it is more than telling then that neither in the course of her 400-page opus, nor in more recent articles or interviews, has Barad attempted to locate her own enterprise within the context of her theoreti- cal framework. Pressed to do so, surely Barad would have to locate her achievements within an intraactive context. Yet to bring her pen to paper is an act of reflection that requires an excentric positionality and level of detachment that no non-human intraactor is privy to, and yet which has no place in her agential realism. Detachment theory can account for the normative context and agency of Barad’s theory. Barad’s agential realism, and to that extent new materialism more generally, in addition to lacking any ability to scale or to show why any difference should make a difference, cannot even account for itself. 248 Moss Notes 1 See for example Moss 2014. 2 See Terry Pinkard’s (2012) discussion of this point in his Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature and the Final Ends of Life (12ff.). 3 An updated translation by James Lennox is available from Oxford University Press (2002). 4 See Depew 2008. 5 See the J. Ackrill edition of Aristotle’s Categories and De Interpretatione (1975), Clarendon Aristotle Series, Oxford University Press. 6 On this point, see Landmann 1974. 7 The nature and role of teleological judgment in aesthetic experience and in what we could now call biology are the principal themes of Kant’s (1790/1792) “Third Critique.” For the most recent English translation, see the Cambridge Series vol- ume, The Critique of the Power of Judgment (2000). 8 For a good overview of the relationship of Hegel’s view of nature to Aristotle, see Pinkard’s (2012) first chapter, “Disenchanted Aristotelian Naturalism.” 9 My understanding of Hegel’s view of freedom and its relation to his notion of “The Concept” has been largely shaped by Neuhouser (2000). 10 McDowell’s views of second nature are both expressed and probed in his debate with Dreyfus. See Shears 2013. 11 The key theoretical text in the elaboration of Deleuze’s own metaphysics is his Difference and Repetition ([1968] 1994). I am deeply indebted to Clare Colebrook (2002) for her highly helpful and lucid Understanding Deleuze. 12 New materialist writer Jane Bennett (2010) has appropriately christened this viewpoint “vital materialism” (64). 13 Helmuth Plessner’s 1928 Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie (The Stages of Organic Being and the Human: Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology) is arguably the most important piece of twentieth-century German philosophy that has yet to be pub- lished in English translation (although happily an English translation is presently in press with Fordham University Press). A major anthology of commentaries in English on Plessner’s work has recently appeared: de Mul 2014.

Works Cited Aristotle. 1975. Aristotle’s Categories and De Interpretatione. Edited by J. Ackrill. Clarendon Aristotle Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Aristotle. 2002. Parts of Animals. Translated by James Lennox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barad, Karen. 2008. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” In Material Feminisms, edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. “A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Colebrook, Clare. 2002. Understanding Deleuze. Crowns Nest NSW: Allen & Unwin. Deleuze, Gilles. (1968) 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. Detachment Theory 249 Depew, David. 2008. “Consequence Etiology and Biological Teleology in Aristotle and Darwin.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biology and Biomedical Sciences 38 (4): 379–90. Kant, Immanuel. (1790/1792) 2000. The Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Landmann, Michael. 1974. Philosophical Anthropology. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Moss, Lenny. 2014. “Detachment and Compensation: Groundwork for a Metaphysics of ‘Biosocial Becoming.’” Philosophy and Social Criticism 40 (1): 91–105. Mul, Jos de, ed. 2014. Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology: Perspectives and Prospects. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. (Distributed by University of Chicago Press). Neuhouser, Fred. 2000. Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pinkard, Terry. 2012. Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature and the Final Ends of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shears, Joseph, ed. 2013. Mind, Reason and Being in the World: The McDowell- Dreyfus Debate. London: Routledge. 11 Materialism, Constructivism, and Political Skepticism Leibniz, Hobbes, and the Erudite Libertines

Mogens Lærke CNRS, ENS de Lyon In an interview published in an anthology on the new materialism, Rosi Braidotti describes it “as a method, a conceptual frame and a political stand, which refuses the linguistic paradigm, stressing instead the concrete yet com- plex materiality of bodies immersed in social relations of power” (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 21). It is the central ambition of new materialism to search out a new basis for political discourse in the “concrete” or “material” nature of things themselves,1 while rejecting the “social constructivism” or “linguistic idealism” which, in the wake of the linguistic turn, according to the new materialists, has contributed to a kind of political skepticism that puts all positions on a par as equally ungrounded, i.e., as equally socially constructed.2 The new materialists intend to solve this problem by propos- ing to “radicalize the relation between epistemology and ontology, thus pro- ducing a new materialism that can access the in-itself,” as Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (2012) summarize the core thesis of Quentin Meillassoux, one of the movement’s foremost figures (16). In short, their aim is to invent a new “social ontology,” as Manuel DeLanda (2006) describes the theoreti- cal field that his new materialist theory of “assemblage” helps construct (1). In the following, I will not enter the details of, and differences between, the “new materialist” doctrines that the movement’s various defenders then provide. Putting to one side some work of obvious merit by Braidotti (Nomadic Subjects), DeLanda (One Thousand Years of Non-Linear History), and a few others, and going behind some of the new materialists’ strikingly complacent self-image as “revolutionary and radical,” “filled with a visionary force,” and “rewriting academia as a whole” (DeLanda 2006, 13, 15; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 40), a great deal of this so-called “new metaphysics” comes through as philosophically shaky. I will however concur with the “new materialists” on their original complaint about social constructivism and congratulate them for taking seriously an element of political skepticism within that tradition that indeed poses some problems.3 Moreover, and this is the aim of this chapter, I will also stress that the problem they attempt to address is by no means a new one in the history of political philosophy and that historical precedence may serve to highlight other ways of constructing the relation between materialism and social constructivism Materialism, Constructivism 251 that makes materialism come out as a considerably less salutary option for “social ontology” than what new materialism suggests. The example I will focus on mainly concerns Thomas Hobbes and one of his seventeenth-century critics, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The new materi- alists’ objections to social constructivism are in important respects analogue to the critiques that, in the early modern period, were raised against the contractualism of Thomas Hobbes, according to which the political was conventionally grounded, not in a given natural law, but in the will of a contractually instated civil sovereign. In a sense, Hobbes’ contractualism was the seventeenth-century version of social constructivism, transferring an insight about the arbitrariness of linguistic signification into the political domain in order to apply it to the notions of sovereignty and political repre- sentation. According to Hobbes’ theory of knowledge, sometimes described as “super-nominalism” (namely by Leibniz), all truth depends on signs and language, the meaning of which is grounded only in convention, i.e., nomi- nal definition, and is thus ultimately arbitrary.4 In his theory of the social contract, Hobbes proposes a theory where civil society acquires a similar conventional basis. Hobbesian contractualism is basically an account of the social and the political exclusively in terms of a linguistic construction built up around the conventional sign of the civil sovereign. The commonwealth is originally constituted when political authority is vested in a sign, namely in the signifier that represents the collective natural right of the people. That signifier is the civil sovereign. Once instated, however, the civil sovereign holds his power not in virtue of the signified, that is to say, the legitimacy of his exercise of power is in no way contingent upon the conformity of his actions with the will of those people whose natural right he represents. For once the contract is concluded, right, and the subsequent construction of positive law based on that right, becomes attached to the signifier, the sovereign, rather than to the signified, i.e., the collective natural right of peo- ple. It has been transferred to what Hobbes also calls “the Representer.”5 Many of Hobbes’ contemporary critics were then concerned that, given its purely conventional basis, civil law could always be reconstructed so as to justify any political action on the part of the sovereign, much in the same way as new materialists today complain that social constructivism, for lack of concrete grounding, can serve to justify just about any political stand, arguing that progressive politics require firm notions of the real, of matter, of objectivity, etc.6 This I hope instructive comparison of seventeenth-century criticisms of Hobbes with new materialism’s critique of social constructivism does how- ever also bring to light a curious discrepancy. For Hobbes was not only the paradigmatic representative of political conventionalism of early modernity; he was also a materialist. In fact, for many, Hobbes was the arch-materialist of the century, holding that everything that is, is corporeal.7 In this case, then, unless we are to pronounce Hobbes’ philosophy as wholly incoherent, it seems as if materialism does not serve as a bulwark against the kind of 252 Lærke social constructivism that contractualism is. Quite on the contrary, given that Hobbes adhered to both, we should expect materialism and contractu- alism to represent mutually compatible, or even mutually supportive, theo- ries. And in fact, while Hobbes himself remained largely silent on the exact connection, some early modern critics of Hobbes denounced materialism for promoting exactly the opposite of what the new materialists now claim it can be used for, arguing that materialism provided an argument in favor of a theory where the political became reduced to arbitrary and dangerous social construction, indeed, that it helped promote a form of political skepticism.8 Here, I focus on one of those critics of Hobbes, namely Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. I am interested in the way in which Leibniz understood the rela- tion between materialism and contractualism as one of doctrinal solidarity rather than opposition. I am in particular interested in the way in which he associated materialism with the political abuse of religion and the conse- quent destruction of theologically grounded natural law. By spelling out the way in which Leibniz thought about these relations between materialism, contractualism, and political skepticism, I want to challenge the idea that materialism can provide firm metaphysical grounding for political discourse, indeed, that one might just as well argue that materialism helps do exactly the opposite. The argument is that materialism as a natural philosophy is too “thin,” or not sufficiently rich in metaphysical principles, to provide the kind of ground for political theory new materialists are looking for. I should stress from the outset that the characterizations of metaphysics as “thin” or “thick” that I employ should not in themselves be seen as passing any judg- ment on the merits of either. I simply make these distinctions to mark the difference between the metaphysics that generate more basic principles and those that generate less. In fact, early modern materialists such as Hobbes saw the “thinness” of their hypothesis, i.e., the extreme economy of its met- aphysical assumptions, as one of its principal merits. Hence, in a sense, it is exactly what makes materialism an attractive natural philosophy, namely its “thinness,” that also makes it an unfit candidate for providing metaphysical grounding for the kind of “social ontology” new materialists are calling out for. That, at least, is the kind of argument that Leibniz can help us make. I must here make two additional remarks in order to forestall some possi- ble objections. The first remark concerns the fact that Hobbes was not only a materialist but also a mechanist. To the extent that many new materialists stress the non-mechanistic nature of their particular brand of materialism,9 it is important to note that, as we shall see, while those issues are of course related, Leibniz’s criticism of Hobbes’ materialism is not essentially predi- cated on the fact that Hobbes is a mechanist but mainly on the rejection of incorporeal forms that the reduction of existence to corporeal existence generally implies. The second remark concerns the kind of political stand that Hobbes adopts. Hobbes’ political leanings—republican or monarchi- cal—have of course been the topic of long-standing debate among schol- ars from the seventeenth century until today. On one influential reading, Materialism, Constructivism 253 Hobbesian materialism was considered “a politically and socially liberating philosophy,” as Catherine Wilson points out.10 On another opposed read- ing, Hobbes’ absolutist notion of sovereignty placed him in the category of “authoritarian” political philosophers. One might then argue that, depend- ing on how one reads him, Hobbes’ position may or may not come out as an appropriate comparison with new materialism’s progressive politi- cal agenda. Leibniz’s reading of Hobbes was of the second, authoritarian variety: his Hobbes has nothing liberating about him! My point, however, does not bear on the question of whether materialism, old or new, can ground progressive, or liberating, politics, but more generally on whether such materialism can efficiently ground any politics. And that is a problem which, as I will suggest with Leibniz, might be common to any materialism qua materialism.

Materialism and the Political Invention of Religion By the term “materialism,” Leibniz refers to the claim that everything exist- ing is of a corporeal nature, i.e., a natural philosophy that denies the exist- ence of spiritual substances or formal principles in nature. Materialists are those “who try to make everything corporeal.”11 Leibniz also dubs “mate- rialism” the doctrines according to which the soul is explicable in terms of physical mechanism. Leibniz himself associates “material philosophy” with the doctrines of the “Epicureans” and the “new Epicureans,”12 mainly Epicurus himself, Democritus, and Hobbes. Hence, for example, in the Considerations on vital principles and plastic natures from 1705, he speaks of “the Democritians, Hobbes, and certain other outright materialists who have rejected every immaterial substance,”13 and, in yet another text from around the same time, Leibniz rejects “the evil doctrine of those who believe, like Epicurus and Hobbes, that the soul is material … as if man himself were only a body or an automaton.”14 Over the last forty years, beginning with a 1974 article by Margaret Dauler Wilson, Leibniz’s critique of materialism has become a standard topic among Anglophone Leibniz scholars. Focus among scholars has mainly been on the so-called “Mill Argument.”15 This is the approach that we find for exam- ple in recent articles by Paul Lodge and Marc Bobro, Charles Landesman, Stewart Duncan, and Marleen Rozemond.16 Along with Catherine Wilson’s book on Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity, which contains a help- ful analysis of Leibniz’s relation to the ancient materialism of Epicurus and Lucretius,17 this substantial secondary literature on the topic provides a good, historically focused idea of how Leibniz placed himself in relation to the “materialist” tradition in early modern natural philosophy. Nobody, to my knowledge, however, has considered Leibniz’s critique of materialism from the perspective of politics. And yet Leibniz him- self made the connection quite explicitly. I was thus originally prompted to question the relation between materialism and politics in Leibniz 254 Lærke by a passage in the Discours sur la théologie naturelle des Chinois, a very long letter from 1716 to the chief counselor of Philippe d’Orléans, Nicolas Remond:

This is thus only the ideas of the moderns who seek to substitute all the spiritual substances by simple material qualities, more or less like the ones Cartesians put in the place of animal souls, or like some of the ancients, in Plato’s Phaedo, thought the soul to be nothing but the harmony or conjunction of material dispositions or the structure of the machine—something that tends to simply destroy religion, as if it was nothing but a political invention made in order to keep peoples to their duties … . (Leibniz 1987, 100–11)

The argument I am interested in here is, of course, the one that brings Leibniz to conclude that a materialist outlook somehow entails, or at least facilitates, a conception of religion as a mere political invention. We should here first note that, when one speaks of religion as a “political invention,” this does not only have implications for the understanding of the role of religion in relation to politics. For Leibniz, it affects politics generally, since it implies that there is no objective grounding for politics all together. This is because, within a more traditional philosophical framework such as Leibniz’s, the normative grounding of political action is ultimately provided by natural theology. Indeed, this is the very foundation of the natural law tradition to which Leibniz belongs. Hence, according to Thomistic political naturalism, still dominant in the seventeenth century, the legitimacy of political action is grounded in the finality of nature itself insofar as the world is an expression of the divine will and thus reflects the purpose of divine creation. Hence, if one claimed that religion itself was a political invention and a political tool, for Leibniz and his fellow defenders of natural law, this amounted to pull- ing out the rug not just from under mainstream theological politics but from under political theory altogether. For them, making such a claim opened the door wide open for political skepticism which, mutatis mutandis, is exactly the sort of position that new materialists today blame social constructivism for lending itself to. In the seventeenth century, however, conceiving religion purely as a political instrument was mainly associated with the so-called esprits forts, predominantly French or Italian writers active in the first half of the seven- teenth century, such as Giulio Cesare Vanini, Gabriel Naudé, and François de La Mothe Le Vayer. Today, following René Pintard, we also speak of them as the “erudite libertines.”18 While their sources and positions were diverse, the erudite libertines were in important respects drawing out the most radical political, religious, and moral consequences from the rediscov- ery of Pyrrhonian skepticism by authors such as Michel de Montaigne and Pierre Charron. Hence, in the introduction to a recent volume dedicated Materialism, Constructivism 255 to Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, John Christian Laursen and Gianni Paganini (2015) present the works by erudite libertines, or thinkers associated with that tradition such as Michel de Montaigne and François de La Mothe Le Vayer, as key figures in a line of thinkers committed to some level of “political skepticism” (3). For Leibniz, the esprits forts constituted an “impious sect” (secta impia) that he also proclaimed the “last of all sects” (sectarum ultimam) and the “most dangerous of them all” (periculossissimam).19 For him, they were first of all characterized by a certain modus vivendi, being what Leibniz some- times calls “practical atheists.”20 Since they had no belief in the immortality of the soul or in divine justice, such practical atheists would “give full rein to their brutal passions and turn their minds to the seduction and corrup- tion of others.”21 They suffered from an “epidemical illness of the mind,”22 the pernicious effects of which were far from limited to the conception of a flawed natural philosophy. They not only facilitated but actively promoted the corruption of morality and true religion. Their theories also had political consequences to the extent that the deliberate loss of moral compass served the justification of clearly unjust political action. Hence, in the Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, Leibniz remarked regarding the esprits forts that, “for them, the mark of the gentleman [honnête homme] and of the honest man [homme honnête] is simply to do nothing base as they understand it. And if in the name of greatness or by mere caprice someone should perpetrate a bloodbath, and if he overturned everything, this would count for nothing, and the Herostratus of the ancients or the Dom Juan of the Festin de Pierre, would both pass for being heroes.”23 Leibniz saw the kind of libertinism that the letter to Remond implicitly but clearly links to materialism as a dangerous doctrinal combination of a skeptical rejection of moral naturalism and a justification of arbitrary and manifestly unjust political action. Without directly naming him when referring to the justification of capri- cious bloodshed in the Nouveaux essais, it is quite possible that Leibniz had in mind Gabriel Naudé’s famous Machiavellian treatise Considérations politiques sur les coups d’état from 1639. Here, Naudé argued that a sov- ereign may legitimately, in view of the public good, sometimes undertake excessive and seemingly irrational actions that completely overstep ordinary law or that have “no order or form of justice” as he puts it.24 The underly- ing political aim was mainly to provide theoretical justification of the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre of the French Protestants in 1572. As already said, this kind of extremist political position was generally considered to be philosophically grounded in Pyrrhonian epistemology. In our passage from the Discours sur la théologie naturelle des Chinois, however, Leibniz rather points to materialism. He does not look to a skeptical epistemology to understand the uprooting of politics from its traditional grounding in natural theology. Rather, he construes materialism as an alternative possible metaphysical foundation for exactly that reduction and that uprooting. In 256 Lærke short, modern materialism provides the grounding that political skepticism originally lacks. Two of the most dangerous movements in Leibniz’s eyes, namely materialism and libertinism or practical atheism, thus combined to form one single destructive doctrinal compound. Indeed, for Leibniz, Hobbesian contractualism and the political skepticism of the erudite liber- tines agreed perfectly in their conception of the merely conventional ground- ing of the legitimacy of political action, opening up the doors for radical political voluntarism, a form of cynical pragmatism where the just was reduced to the will of the most powerful, the position that Plato attributed to the sophist Thrasymachus in the beginning of The Republic.25

The “Too Material Philosophers” and the “Alleged Freethinkers” But how exactly is it that materialism combines with contractualism and, ultimately, political skepticism? Leibniz’s reply is that materialism is a meta­physical, or in a sense anti-metaphysical, position that does not rep- resent an obstacle to political skepticism, to the extent that the consid- eration of bodies and matter alone will not yield a sufficiently rich set of principles for normatively grounding political action. In short, material- ism is a natural philosophy so metaphysically “thin” that it leaves com- pletely open the possibility of constructing the political as nothing but conventional or even arbitrary. Hence the overall coherence of Hobbes’ natural and political philosophy. In order to better grasp Leibniz’s reasoning here, we can turn to the 1686 Discours de métaphysique. In section 20 of that famous text, Leibniz pro- vides a French translation of 97b–99c of Plato’s Phaedo by way of refuting the “too material philosophers.” The passage can be summarized as follows: There is an intelligent being who is the cause of all things. This intelligent thing is the most perfect being possible, or God. The divine power lays out everything in the most beautiful manner. Leibniz concludes by insisting on the importance of providing “a reason why things are engendered, disap- pear, or subsist.”26 This is also how Leibniz summarizes Plato’s text when writing to the French cleric Paul Fontanier-Pellisson a few years later:

I am delighted to learn how you have already noted that one must search for the reason of things in divine intelligence. I very much like the passage in Plato’s Phaedo in this respect, and I have quoted something from it, but the whole passage deserves to be read, or reported, since it appears to me to be both beautiful and solid. And it has very good use in our time, to bring the too material philosophers to embrace something superior. The effect is never well understood except through its cause. That is why one is very much mistaken in trying to explicate the first principles of nature without considering Nous, or divine wisdom, and considering the best and the most perfect, the final causes.27 Materialism, Constructivism 257 Refuting material philosophy involves reflecting on the underlying finality of the world and on that which provides the reason of physical mechanism, thus reaching for the ratio rationis. In order to refute the “too material phi- losophers,” one must develop an argument in favor of an intelligent creator and insist on the underlying finality of nature as the real cause of things. But who exactly is Leibniz arguing against here; who are the “too mate- rial philosophers”? As already mentioned above, Hobbes and Epicurus are the standard culprits in most of Leibniz’s texts on materialism, and he must surely also have them in mind here. The Discours de métaphysique does however also implicitly make yet another suggestion. The section 20 on the “too material philosophers” does not name any names. It does how- ever begin with the phrase “cela me fait souvenir d’un beau passage de Socrate … .” This transition strongly suggests that we can search out some further indications about materialism in the previous section 19. And indeed we do:

Anyone who sees the admirable structure of the animals is brought to recognize the wisdom of the author of things, and I advise those who have some sense of piety and even of the true philosophy to take dis- tance from the utterances made by some alleged freethinkers [quelques esprits forts prétendus] who say that one sees because one has eyes, but without the eyes having been made for seeing. When one seriously maintains these opinions which refer everything to the necessity of mat- ter or to a certain chance (even though both must appear ridiculous to those who have understood what we explained above) it is difficult to admit that there is an intelligent author of nature.28

The expression “esprits forts prétendus” that Leibniz here employs in order to identify his adversaries has exact connotations that would be recognized without difficulty by any reasonably cultivated seventeenth-century reader. He is alluding to François Garasse’s La Doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps, ou prétendus tels (1623), an influential polemical work directed against the erudite libertines.29 So here, once again, Leibniz implicitly assim- ilates Hobbes to the erudite libertines, just like in the Discours sur la théolo- gie naturelle des Chinois. In this case, however, the common denominator is not an alleged shared conception of the political as based exclusively on convention. Rather, the focus is on the denial of finality in nature that mate- rialism involves, and the opening for skepticism it provides. Materialism of the Hobbesian variety disallows for any formal or spiritual principles at work in nature while affirming only mechanical relations between bodies. For Leibniz, however, rejecting incorporeal principles in nature and allow- ing for the existence of corporeal principles alone, be they mechanical or not, amounts to rejecting the presence of divine wisdom in nature and the work of providence, thus doing harm to religion. But, and this is the cru- cial point, it also deprives natural law theory of its traditional objective 258 Lærke grounding in natural theology, and therefore it also does political harm by providing political skepticism with the kind of metaphysics, almost an anti- metaphysics, most susceptible to support its agenda. In short, Leibniz sees the anti-finalism implied in the materialist rejection of formalism, the strict economy of metaphysical principles that it calls for, as an open invitation to destroy natural religion and indulge in political skepticism. On this point, Leibniz’s worry was of course far from ungrounded. The anti-finalism inscribed in materialism was in fact used by radical freethink- ers to promote political skepticism. We find a very clear example of such an argument, albeit probably unknown to Leibniz, in the Traité des trois imposteurs or L’Esprit de Spinoza, a virulent clandestine treatise that cir- culated as manuscript as early as 1678, but was first published in 1719.30 Here, the anonymous author uses the arguments of modern natural philoso- phy against final causes, predicated on the rejection of formal, incorporeal principles in nature, exactly to show how religion is nothing but a political invention, as argued by Hobbes and Naudé. The author explains, following Spinoza, that if people believe in final causes, or that the world as such has a purpose, it is because they are deceived into believing in divine providence by religious authorities searching to legitimize their own political agenda by appealing to what is “natural.” Here, exactly as Leibniz predicted, material- ism and political skepticism go hand in hand.

Back to the Lab Again: Reconsidering Natural Theology Leibniz’s analysis suggests that materialism cannot efficiently serve as the basis for a response to contractualism because materialism does not gener- ate principles that are suitable for grounding a viable new political natural- ism. As metaphysics, materialism is simply too thin. It leaves the space wide open for political conventionalism and, ultimately, political skepticism. For Leibniz, the kind of theory required to counter contractualism is of an entirely different nature. The first two letters from Leibniz to Samuel Clarke contain some of his most poignant criticisms of materialism, blaming it for the decline of reli- gion: “Natural religion itself seems to decay [in England] very much. Many will have human souls to be material; others make God himself a corporeal being.”31 This passage is most often read in the context of Leibniz’s criticism of John Locke whom he reproached for not taking a definite stand on the question of whether the human soul is material or immaterial. The subse- quent discussion between Leibniz and Clarke on this topic turned mainly on the question of the respective contributions of mathematics and metaphysics to the decline of natural religion. What is less frequently noted, however, is that Leibniz in the correspondence with Clarke also brought his critique of the materialists to bear on issues related to political philosophy. Hence, the antidote he proposed to materialism, i.e., the metaphysical principles that he opposed to the materialists’ corrupt ones, were exactly the same principles Materialism, Constructivism 259 of divine government that were also at the heart of Leibniz’s own natural law theory. In the second letter to Clarke, Leibniz wrote the following while defend- ing his idea that God has pre-established the order of the world and does not intervene in creation:

This opinion does not exclude God’s providence or his government of the world; on the contrary, it makes it perfect. A true providence of God requires a perfect foresight. But then it requires, moreover, not only that he should have foreseen everything, but also that he should have provided for everything beforehand with proper remedies; other- wise, he must lack either wisdom to foresee things or power to provide for them […]. The comparison of a king, under whose reign everything should go on without his interposition, is by no means to the present purpose, since God continually preserves everything and nothing can subsist without him. His kingdom is therefore not a nominal one. It is just as if one should say that a king who should originally have taken care to have his subjects so well educated, and should, by his care in providing for their subsistence, preserve them so well in their fitness for their several stations and in their good affection toward him, as that he should have no occasion ever to be amending anything among them, would be only a nominal king.32

Leibniz here replies to an objection from Clarke according to which the theory of pre-established harmony involves a natural determinism that ren- ders divine governance pointless. Implicitly, Clarke claimed that Leibniz himself, on account of his determinism, did as much harm to natural reli- gion as did the materialists he rejected. Leibniz here replies that, in reality, the moral issue with materialism is not determinism but non-providential determinism. In order to maintain the image of God as a being governing the world like a king, what is needed is not constant intervention in the world on God’s part, but a conception of divine governance that includes the consideration of finality and providence, of purpose and design. The proper remedy to harmful materialism, for Leibniz, was then to replace the materialist notion that the world is determined exclusively by mechanical causation among bodies with the formalist image of the world as a world of forms, soul-like substances, or monads, whose actions are fully determined by God according to a given purpose, namely that of bringing into existing the best possible world. For, as Leibniz argues in the Journal des sçavants in 1697, “if God is the author of things, and supremely wise, one cannot reason well about the structure of the universe without taking into account the reason of the architect,” contrary to Anaximander who had “contented himself with the shapes and movements of matter; and that is exactly also what is the case when it comes to our too material philosophers.”33 In other words, against the materialists, natural philosophy must be invested with a 260 Lærke richer set of metaphysical principles, and in particular with formalistic and finalistic principles allowing to sustain conceptions of divine providence and foresight within the framework of strict determinism. One has to conceive of a “thick” metaphysics, including souls, forms, and divine providence, in order to undo the harm done by materialism to natural religion. These principles of natural theology are however also those Leibniz appealed to in order to refute contractualism. Hence, in his political writ- ings, Leibniz insisted that in order to overcome Hobbes’ political theory one had to take into account the sociable nature of man, that man is made in the image of God, that we are always members of the universal republic obliging us toward God above all and that both citizens and sovereigns are bound by the universal principles of wisdom and goodness (together defin- ing justice, as “the charity of the wise”). In both instances, in the refutation of materialism as well as of contractualism, it is the metaphysically rich image of God as universal legislator and governor of the universal republic of souls that does the essential work. For Leibniz, then, the only viable alter- native to both materialism and contractualism, alone capable of staving off political conventionalism and its dangerous avatar, political skepticism, was natural theology, a metaphysically rich theory of divine purpose and design. However, to spell out the analogy, I presume that this is not an alterna- tive option to social constructivism new materialists would be willing to (or should) consider, given that, for them, one of the principal problems with social constructivism is that it provides possible justification for creationism (that Leibniz would not subscribe to) and theories of intelligent design (that he clearly would endorse).

Conclusion: Is There a Spinozist Escape Route? One of the hallmarks of new materialism is the effort to provide “concrete” grounding for a “political stand,” to use Braidotti’s terms. New materialists attempt to provide a new basis for the political that is irreducible to social constructions, a “social ontology.” This is an ambition that, in the tradition of political philosophy, can also be described, in the most general terms, as a naturalist one. Naturalism in political philosophy is the idea that there is, in the very nature of things and how they relate to each other, something that may serve as basis for making claims about the lawful character of political actions, as opposed to positions that consider the legitimacy of political action either as conventionally grounded (contractualism) or sim- ply ungrounded beyond the reference to the arbitrary will of ruler (politi- cal skepticism). New materialists criticize social constructivists for lending themselves to a new kind of political skepticism. Their talk about providing “concrete” grounding for the political clearly suggests that the remedy they have in mind is some sort of political naturalism. Now, Leibniz thought that contractualism (Hobbes) was at the end of the day aligned with political skepticism (Naudé). In this respect, the kind Materialism, Constructivism 261 of argument he developed mirrored that of the new materialists today when they complain about the pernicious consequences of social constructivism. Whereas, for obvious reasons, the concrete political concerns they have are not the same, Leibniz and the new materialists to some extent construe the slippery slope leading from constructivism to skepticism in similar ways. They also share the idea that some kind of ontological grounding of politics is required to overcome the problem. The question is however whether a new materialism is indeed the most appropriate tradition to appeal to in order to fulfill such an ambition. Will a materialist metaphysics ultimately prove capable of producing arguments that can efficiently serve the purpose of opposing social constructivism? The analysis of Leibniz’s critique of Hobbes I have developed suggests the possibility of an answer in the negative. For Leibniz, at least, materialism, mechanistic or not, but simply understood as the reduction of the real to the corporeal and the rejection of all incorporeal forms in nature, was too metaphysically thin to sustain any such ambition. Quite on the contrary, because of its metaphysical minimalism, material- ism was in fact the natural philosophy that corresponded to contractual- ism and, ultimately, also to political skepticism. The lesson one might then draw for today is that opposing social constructivism by appealing to some natural or “concrete” grounding for legitimate political action will require a conception of the “concrete” that is richer in metaphysical principles than materialism can afford. New materialists may here complain that what they understand by “materialism” is something very different from Hobbes’ sim- ple claim that everything is corporeal. That may very well be. Nonetheless, when Quentin Meillassoux’s new materialism, for example, is described as a philosophy that “intends to do justice to matter and the contingency of nature most radically, while stressing the limitlessness of thought,”34 what- ever that is supposed to mean, it seems to me very hard to get sufficient nor- mative content out of such an ambition to come anywhere near providing sufficient grounding for a particular “political stand” in the way that Rosi Braidotti maintains must eventually be the goal of the exercise. It seems to me that “metaphysics” based on such appeals to indetermination (contin- gency and limitlessness) leaves the political field wide open for just about any agenda, which is exactly the same kind of opening toward political skepticism that Leibniz also detected in Hobbes’ metaphysically thin mate- rialism. The point here is not to say that some materialist stand promot- ing contingency, limitlessness, and other forms of indeterminacy, cannot cohabit with some political agenda. The point is that such a stand cannot, in itself, generate any such specific agenda. Additional principles are necessar- ily required. But if those principles do not flow directly from the materialist ontology qua materialist, which Leibniz argued that they cannot, then the connection between materialism and the political agenda remains perfectly arbitrary. This, of course, does not imply that materialists cannot hold par- ticular progressive political views or even that self-proclaimed materialists have in fact held such political views. For example, Catherine Wilson argues 262 Lærke in this volume how, throughout the early modern period, “materialism was the metaphysics of the party of humanity.”35 The point is that, at least on Leibniz’s reading, any such connection is ultimately contingent. So what is to be done? As already noted, it is not likely that new mate- rialists would be willing to follow Leibniz’s suggestion and become natural theologians instead. There is however one seventeenth-century alternative. Although it was rarely recognized by early modern readers who rather tended to confound them, Hobbes was not only challenged by traditional natural theologians and natural laws theorists such as Leibniz, but also by the modern naturalism of Spinoza. Just like Leibniz, Spinoza opposed Hobbes’ contractualism and aimed at replacing contractualism with a form of naturalism. However, in Spinoza, and contrary to Leibniz, the legitimacy of political action was not to be ontologically grounded in the divinely informed structure of the natural world, but in the immanent power rela- tions that at any time exist between a sovereign and his people.36 Now, the way that Rosi Braidotti, in the passage quoted in the introduction, presents how “new materialism” opposes linguistic idealism and social constructiv- ism by insisting on “concrete power relations” is not without parallels to the way in which Spinoza, in his two political treatises, developed a new, modern form of naturalism against Hobbesian contractualism. And indeed, Spinoza’s theory of power is a good alternative to constructivism and it is an option that has gained some traction among contemporary social the- orists. A good example of this is the way in which Moira Gatens in her excellent earlier work in feminist theory took up themes from Spinoza’s theory of bodies and affects to support her conception of the imaginary and her critique and reconstruction of the sex/gender distinction.37 But here, once again, it is far from clear that “new materialism” is the appropriate notion to capture such a Spinozist strategy in the way that someone like Jane Bennett, in her Vibrant Matter, has argued.38 First of all, and despite a long reception history from Diderot to Althusser that could suggest the contrary,39 it remains doubtful whether Spinoza can really pass for being a materialist. After all, he grants no particular ontological privilege to bodies over minds, to extension over thought, etc. And one can, as the history of reception from Hegel to Della Rocca equally shows, just as well construct him as an idealist.40 Fidelity to Spinoza’s texts would seem to require that we find ways to negotiate a genuine metaphysical middle ground between materialism and idealism without giving in to facile reading strategies reduc- ing him to either of those options. But more importantly, I am unconvinced that there is more to gain than to lose from seeing Spinoza as a materialist in the context of “social ontology.” In any case, it is not what Moira Gatens did in her, to my mind successful, work on Spinoza and social theory. So, to conclude with an open question, should we think that Spinozism would be the more attractive alternative to social constructivism than new mate- rialism? Maybe, but only on the condition that we do not reduce Spinoza’s position to something as metaphysically thin as materialism, old and new, Materialism, Constructivism 263 but rather reconstruct it without any materialist or idealist reduction as a metaphysically thick alternative to natural theology.

Notes -Abbreviations for Leibniz: A = Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, Berlin: Akademie Verlag 1923 [citations indicate series number, volume within series, and page within volume]; AG = Philosophical Essays, edited and translated by R. Ariew and D. Garber, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989. GP = Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, edited by C. I. Gerhardt, Berlin: Wiedmann, 1875– 90); L = Philosophical Papers and Letters, edited by L. E. Loemker, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own.

1 Manuel DeLanda for example describes new materialism as “[taking] as its point of departure the existence of a material world that is independent of our minds” (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 39). 2 See for example Coole and Frost (2010): “We share the feeling current among many researchers that the dominant constructivist orientation to social analysis is inadequate for thinking about matter, materiality, and politics in ways that do jus- tice to the contemporary context of biopolitics and global political economy” (6). See also DeLanda 2006, 45–46; see also Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012, 98. Karen Barad’s (2007) work on “agential realism,” an objectivist position opposed to “moral relativism,” is an early, and I think interesting, instance of this criticism of constructivism, developed in a feminist context. For a more conciliatory account of Barad’s own difficulties in taking sides in the debate, see Barad 1997, in particular: “[M]ateriality matters: there are social and mate- rial reasons for knowledge claims … and socially constructed knowledges have real material consequences. These conceptions of materiality are opposed to the immediacy of matter in naïve realist accounts and its neglect in social construc- tivist accounts. It seems to me that giving up on realism would be as hasty as giving up on objectivity. Feminists have interrogated, redefined, and retheorized objectivity; agential realism is an attempt to formulate a feminist notion of real- ism” (188). 3 I am grateful to Jess Keiser for pointing this out to me during the “Perspectives on Materialism” conference organized at Rice University in February 2014 as a collaboration between the Rice seminar on “Materialism and New Materialism” and the Centre d’Études en Rhétorique, Philosophie et Histoire des Idées (CERPHI) at the ENS de Lyon. 4 See Hobbes 1996, chapter 4: “Of Speech,” 25. 5 See Hobbes 1996, chapter 16: “Of Persons, Authors, and things Personated,” 111–115. 6 See note 3 above. 7 See for example Hobbes 1996, chapter 4: “Of Speech”: “[…] men make a name of two names, whose significations are contradictory and inconsistent; as this name, an incorporeal body, or (which is all one) an incorporeal substance, and a great number more […]” (30). There is of course a long substantial discussion about the nature and extent of Hobbes’ materialism and about whether he was always a materialist. I will leave that aside here. I think there can be little doubt that the Hobbes of the Leviathan was a materialist or about the fact that, for the vast majority of Hobbes’ early modern readers, he was the materialist par excellence. 8 It is in this respect quite telling that Samantha Frost’s appropriation of Hobbes only proves possible at the cost of reading the English philosopher in a way that Frost herself presents as strongly revisionary. Indeed, when introducing 264 Lærke her Lessons from a Materialist Thinker (2008), she proclaims that she hopes to bring about nothing less than “a gestalt shift in the way we look at and under- stand both Hobbes and ourselves” by providing a “radically different picture of this notorious thinker” (1–2 and 12). A more guarded reader could here sus- pect that the approach, which de facto discards previous Hobbes scholarship as globally misguided, might itself be guided by concerns that eventually prove foreign to what can count as genuinely Hobbesian. Previous scholarship is more- over presented oddly as being univocally attached to an image of Hobbes as “authoritarian.” In short, new materialism, it seems, can only use Hobbes on the condition that that proper name comes to refer to a philosopher holding views different from those that historical scholarship teaches us that Hobbes in fact held. Among those views, I think, belongs Frost’s basic thesis that Hobbes’ most central concern was to counter Cartesian dualism with a conception of subjects as “thinking-bodies” (17). 9 See for example Bennett 2010, chapter 5, 39–51. Regarding the historical prob- lems involved in setting up “new materialism” in a simple opposition to “old materialism,” conceived as exclusively mechanist, see in this volume Charles T. Wolfe, “Varieties of Vital Vitalism.” 10 See in this volume Catherine Wilson, “Materialism, Old and New, and the Party of Humanity.” The republican reception of Hobbes in seventeenth-century Holland, by writers such as Lambert Van Velthyusen, Pieter de la Court, and, to some extent, Spinoza, are good examples of such “progressive” early mod- ern approaches to Hobbes (to the extent that “progressive” politics would be a notion that would make any sense to them). For some recent work on this tradi- tion, see the introduction by Catherine Secrétan in van Velthuysen (2013). 11 Leibniz, On Nature Itself, L, 501. 12 See Leibniz, Two Sects of Naturalists (1677–1680), AG, 281–84. 13 Leibniz, Considerations on Vital Principles and Plastic Natures (1705), L, 587–88. 14 Leibniz, Reply to Bayle, Rorarius (1702), L, 577. 15 The so-called “Mill argument” appears in §17 of the Monadology, where Leibniz invites his reader to imagine that she could walk into the brain as one can walk into a mill and observe the machinery. He then wonders if such a visit to the brain would allow us to observe the mechanical or material production of thoughts and sentiments, but only to conclude “that, when inspecting its interior, we will only find parts that push one another, and we will never find anything to explain a perception” (Leibniz, Monadology, section 17, AG, 215) 16 See Lodge and Bobro 1998; Landesman 2011; Duncan 2010 and 2012; Rozemond 2014; P. Lodge 2014. There are a few exceptions. See for example Grosholz 1996 and Hunter 2010. 17 See Wilson 2005. See also Wilson 2006. 18 On the erudite libertines generally, see Pintard [1943] 2000 and Charles-Daubert 1998. 19 Leibniz to Ludwig van Seckendorff, 1683, A, series 1, volume 3, 572. For details on Leibniz’s relation to the libertines, see Lærke 2007 and 2009. 20 Leibniz à Bierling, undated, GP 7:511. 21 Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, c. 1703–1705, IV, xvi, §4, A, series 6, volume 4, 463. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. Herostratus was a Greek who, seeking notoriety, burned down the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus in 356 BC. His name subsequently became associated with any criminal act committed for the sole purpose of fame. Le Festin de Pierre is, of course, Molière’s play from 1665, describing the unholy debauchery of Don Juan, a figure who came to, and indeed still does, represent the literary epitome of the esprit fort or erudite libertine of the seventeenth century. Materialism, Constructivism 265

24 See in particular Naudé’s (1639) definition of the coup d’état (by which he means something quite different from what we understand by it today) as “extraor- dinary and bold actions that princes are forced to undertake in difficult and unresolvable cases, against the ordinary law, without even retaining any order nor form of justice, putting aside individual interests, and in view of the public good” (65). 25 On the “despotic” justum est potentiori utile and the similarity between Hobbes and Thrasymachus, see Leibniz, Mars christianissimus, 1683, A, series 4, volume 2, 478; and Leibniz [1702] 1988, 46–47. I shall not here address the difficult issue of Hobbes’ actual relations with, and response to, those French esprits forts who championed forms of political skepticism. On this topic, see G. Paganini, “Hobbes and the French Skeptics,” in Laursen and Paganini (2015, 55–82). 26 See Leibniz, Discours de métaphysique, art. XX, 1686, A, series 6, volume 4, 1562 (for some reason, neither L nor AG includes the actual passage from Plato that Leibniz quotes). 27 Leibniz à Pellisson, 8/18 January 1692, A, series 2, volume 2, 486. See also Leibniz, “Réponse aux reflexions,” GP, 4:339. 28 Leibniz, Discours de métaphysique, section XIX, A, series 6, volume 4, 1561. 29 Leibniz also alludes to Garasse’s work in Principes de la nature et de la grace, 1714, §4, GP 6:600, and in the Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, II, xxii, §73, A, series 6, volume 6, 212. 30 For a long time, indeed since the Middle Ages, this notorious Traité des trois imposteurs existed mainly as a rumor. Eventually it materialized in the form of a clandestine manuscript, also named L’Esprit de Spinoza (from around 1678), and later a publication (first printed edition from 1719). This anonymous text was written as a sort of collage of passages from Gabriel Naudé’s Considérations politiques sur les coups d’état (1639), Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), and Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670) and Ethica (1677), arguing that the found- ers of the three monotheistic religions, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, were noth- ing but astute politicians, i.e., “impostors,” who invented and used religion for the sole purpose of keeping an ignorant populace under their sway. For details, see the critical edition by Françoise Charles-Daubert (1999), and the following commentaries: Charles Daubert (in Ramond and Moreau 2006, 98–109), and Mogens Lærke (in Ramond and Moreau 2006, 234–35). On Leibniz and the Traité des trois imposteurs, see Lærke (2007, 284–87). 31 Leibniz, First Letter to Clarke, AG, 320. 32 Leibniz, Second Letter to Clarke, AG, 323. 33 Leibniz, Réponse aux réflexions, GP 4:339. 34 Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 16. 35 See in this volume Wilson, “Materialism, Old and New.” 36 See Spinoza to Jarig Jelles, 2 June 1674, Letter 50: “With regard to political theory, the difference between Hobbes and myself, which is the subject of your inquiry, consists in this, that I always preserve the natural right in its entirety, and I hold that the sovereign power in a State has right over a subject only in propor- tion to the excess of its power over that of a subject. This is always the case in a state of nature” (Spinoza 2002, 891–92). For details, see Lærke 2008, 181–246, or Lærke 2012. 37 See Gatens 1996. 38 See Bennett 2010, esp. chapter 1, 62–81. 39 On Diderot, materialism, and Spinozism, see for example Burbage and Chouchan 1990; on Althusser and Spinoza, see the recent book by Knox Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology (2014). 40 For Hegel, see his 1825–1826 Lectures on the History of Philosophy, where Spinoza is depicted as an acosmist who denies the reality of particular things 266 Lærke by proclaiming them mere modes of a unique substance and as an idealist who ultimately allows for the full existence of a single spiritual being, namely God. A good recent commentary is Melamed 2010. For Michael Della Rocca, see Spinoza (2009). According to him, Spinoza subscribed to a two fold application of the principle of sufficient reason that ultimately led him to assume that all relations are reducible to conceptual relations—a reading of Spinoza that has clear idealist implications. On this, see Lærke 2014.

Works Cited Barad, Karen. 1997. “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism without Contradiction.” In Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science, edited by L. Hankinson Nelson and J. Nelson, 161–94. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2012. “Interview with Rosi Braidotti.” In New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, edited by R. Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Burbage, Frank and Nathalie Chouchan. 1990. “À propos du rapport Diderot- Spinoza: Spinozisme et matérialisme chez Diderot.” In Spinoza au XVIIIe siècle, edited by O. Bloch, 169–81. Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck. Charles-Daubert, Françoise 1998. Les libertins érudits en France au XVIIe siècle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Charles-Daubert, Françoise, ed. 1999. Le “Traité des trois imposteurs” et “L’Esprit de Spinoza.” Philosophie clandestine entre 1678 et 1768. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. 2010. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, 1–47. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. DeLanda, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society. London and New York: Continuum. DeLanda, Manuel. 2012. “Interview with Manuel DeLanda.” In New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Edited by R. Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Della Rocca, Michael. 2009. Spinoza. New York: Routledge. Dolphijn, Rick and Iris van der Tuin, eds. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Duncan, Stewart. 2010. “Leibniz on Hobbes’s Materialism.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 41 (1): 11–18. Duncan, Stewart. 2012. “Leibniz’s Mill Arguments against Materialism.” Philosophical Quarterly 62 (247): 250–72. Frost, Samantha. 2008. Lessons from a Materialist Thinker. Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Garasse, François. 1623. La Doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps, ou prétendus tels. Paris: Sebastien Chappelet. Gatens, Moira. 1996. Imaginary Bodies. Ethics, Power and Corporeality. London: Routledge. Materialism, Constructivism 267 Grosholz, Emily. 1996. “Plato and Leibniz against the Materialists.” Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (2): 255–76. Hobbes, Thomas. 1996. Leviathan. Edited by R. Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hunter, Graeme. 2010. “Leibnizian Materialism.” Dialogue 49 (4): 573–88. Lærke, Mogens. 2007. “Les sept foyers du libertinage selon G. W. Leibniz.” La Lettre Clandestine 15: 269–97. Lærke, Mogens. 2008. Leibniz lecteur de Spinoza. La genèse d’une opposition com- plexe. Paris: Honoré Champion. Lærke, Mogens. 2009. “Leibniz et le libertinage: quatre fonctions théoriques.” In Libertinage et philosophie au XVIIe siècle, edited by P.F. Moreau and A. McKenna, volume 11, 267–85. St. Etienne: Presses Universitaires de St. Étienne. Lærke, Mogens. 2012. “Leibniz on Spinoza’s Political Philosophy.” In Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, edited by D. Garber and D. Rutherford, volume 6, 105–34. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lærke, Mogens. 2014. “Les études spinozistes aux États-Unis. Spinoza et le Principe de Raison Suffisante. Représentations, concepts, idées.” Archives de Philosophie 77: 721–26. Landesman, Charles. 2011. Leibniz’s Mill: A Challenge to Materialism. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Laursen John-Christian, and Gianni Paganini, eds. 2015. Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1875–90. Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Edited by C.I. Gerhardt. Berlin: Wiedmann. :Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1923. Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe. Berlin Akademie-Verlag. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1987. Discours sur la théologie naturelle des Chinois. Edited by C. Frémont. Paris: Éditions de l’Herne. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. [1702] 1988. Méditation sur la notion commune de la justice. Translation in Political Writings. Edited by P. Riley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 45–64. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1989a. Philosophical Essays. Edited and translated by R. Ariew and D. Garber. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1989b. Philosophical Papers and Letters. Edited by L. E. Loemker. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Lodge, Paul. 2014. “Leibniz’s Mill Argument against Mechanical Materialism Revisited.” Ergo 1 (3): 79–99. Lodge, Paul, and Marc Bobro. 1998. “Stepping Back inside Leibniz’s Mill.” The Monist 81: 554–73. Melamed, Yitzhak Y. 2010. “Acosmism or Weak Individuals? Hegel, Spinoza, and the Reality of the Finite.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 48 (1): 77–92. Naudé, Gabriel. 1639. Considérations politiques sur les coups d’estat. Rome: [editor lacking]. Peden, Knox. 2014. Spinoza Contra Phenomenology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pintard, René. [1943] 2000. Le Libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle. Reprint. Geneva/Paris: Slatkine Reprints. Ramond, C. and P.F. Moreau, eds. 2006. Lectures de Spinoza. Paris: Ellipses. 268 Lærke Rozemond, Marleen. 2014. “Mills Can’t Think: Leibniz’s Approach to the Mind-Body Problem.” Res philosophica 91 (1): 1–28. [doi: 10.11612/resphil.2014.91.1.1] Spinoza, Baruch. 2002. Collected Works. Translated by S. Shirley. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Van Velthuysen, Lambert. 2013. A Letter on the Principles of Justness and Decency, Containing a Defence of the Treatise De Cive of the Learned Mr. Hobbes. Translation by M. de Mowbray. Leiden: Brill. Wilson, Catherine. 2005. Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, Catherine. 2006. “The Problem of Materialism in the Nouveaux Essais.” In Leibniz selon les Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, edited by F. Duchesneau and J. Griard, 249–64. Paris/Montréal: Vrin/Bellarmin. Wilson, Margaret Dauler. 1974. “Leibniz and Materialism.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 3: 495–513. Reprinted in M. D. Wilson. 1999. Ideas and Mechanism. Essays on Early Modern Philosophy, 388–406. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 12 Normativity Matters Philosophical Naturalism and Political Theory

Christian J. Emden Rice University

The Posthuman Politics of Nature Normativity is a notoriously underdefined concept. Yet, it is also a central concern of political theory and philosophical naturalism. Neither can exist without a conception of normativity, although there are profound disagree- ments, for instance, about the relationship between the normative dimen- sion of the world we live in and our ability to both criticize and change those norms.1 Over the past decade, however, posthumanism and new material- ism have sought to challenge the epistemic and ethical norms that mark the European philosophical tradition. From a theoretical perspective that largely stands outside the mainstream of contemporary philosophy, post- humanism and new materialism criticize, and ultimately reject, the stance of much political theory and the claims of philosophical naturalism. The latter, they argue, represent an anthropocentric and Eurocentric view of nature and social life with restrictive, even oppressive, normative commit- ments that are best left behind. Nevertheless, such challenges are themselves of an inherently normative kind: a vitalist conception of living matter and a monist ontology, which often stand at the heart of both posthumanism and new materialism, certainly imply that the attributes of whatever has been regarded as “human” need to be revised to allow, for instance, for a new “trans-species egalitarianism” that renegotiates the boundaries between that which has been described as “human” and that which traditionally has been viewed as “animal life” (Braidotti 2013, 140).2 Such demands are inevitably tied up with normative claims about how we ought to think about “life” and how we ought to act politically and ethically. Posthumanists and new materialists might criticize the normative claims to be found, for example, in Kantian political theory with its emphasis on a particular understanding of subjectivity, and they might also reject the representationalist underpin- nings of traditional philosophical naturalism, but this should not be taken to mean that their own claims are less normative. Posthumanism and new materialism have no real qualms in claiming not only that the ethical world is effectively coextensive with whatever there is in an ontological sense, but that matter itself, and the agency of mat- ter, demands of us very specific substantive political commitments. Rosi 270 Emden Braidotti (2013), for instance, argues for a “post-naturalistic” critique in which “matter” is simply seen as “continuous” with culture: “the unity of all living matter,” together with “the self-organizing … force of living matter,” allows for a “progressive politics” that renders obvious “the inter- connections among the greenhouse effect, the status of women, racism and xenophobia and frantic consumerism” (3, 29, 35, 57, 93). To put it more sharply, a monist ontology that stretches from molecules to the institu- tional configurations of political life inevitably leads to a critique of neo- liberal capitalism. Despite such direct appeals to specific political and ethical commitments, posthumanism and new materialism are largely unconcerned with the ques- tion of normativity itself. There are two reasons for this. First, norms and normativity are seen as imposing undue restrictions on human flourishing, or rather, the flourishing of different experimental ways of living, since the latter does not have to be limited to whatever we regard as human. Second, any reference to the normative is seen to imply an anthropocentric philo- sophical vision that normalizes what it means to be human, or to be any- thing else for that matter.3 Against this background, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010) argued that an “urgent reason for turning to materialism is the emergence of pressing ethical and political concerns that accompany the scientific and technological advances predicated on new scientific models of matter and, in particular, living matter.” Rethinking matter as something that is dynamic, self-organizing, and marked by agency also allows for a more concrete appreciation of “global and capital flows” at the intersection of “biopolitics and global political economy” (Coole and Frost 2010, 5–6). New material- ism’s political and ethical concerns, as Jane Bennett (2010) suggested, are a response to illusions of rational control over things that are directly respon- sible for “our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption” (ix). But what if the worldly things that surround us are not only something to be controlled—through power plants, nuclear weapons, or the modelling effects of the efficient-market hypothesis? What if they are better under- stood as “agents or forces” that are a constitutive part of our own agency (viii)? Quite in contrast to the tradition of historical materialism, new mate- rialism thus implies a posthumanist perspective, while posthumanist inter- ventions themselves require a materialist framework.4 The convergence of posthumanism and new materialism, as Cary Wolfe (2010) pointed out, has direct implications for our ethical attitude to the world of which we are a part. The ongoing “decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks” not only demands of us to question “the ontologically closed domain of consciousness, reason, reflec- tion, and so on,” but has “profound ethical implications for our relations to nonhuman forms of life” (Wolfe 2010, xv and xxv–xxvi). Rethinking the relationships between the human and the nonhuman demands of us, as Bruno Latour claimed, to reassess the very nature of what it means to think Normativity Matters 271 politically. When Latour drew the conclusion that, whatever we might have been, we certainly have never really been modern, he points to the illusory status of what is often described as one of the centerpieces of modern sub- jectivity: the distinction between the human and the nonhuman. We might have dreamed up a modernity of autonomous individuals governed by rea- son in which this distinction holds water, but in reality such a distinction has always been impossible (Latour 1993, 13–48). As an alternative, Latour (2004a) recommends practicing political thinking as ecology, drawing on the way in which the disunity of the sciences and their practices render obvi- ous a fundamental pluralism with regard to what we describe, in a short- hand way, as nature (see 221–30). The way in which posthumanism and new materialism seek to decenter the human looks to undercut traditional conceptions of the ethical based on autonomous individuals as rational agents, such as “Kantian moral respon- sibility” (Braidotti 2013, 41). Moreover, rejecting such dominant norma- tive philosophical claims that are seen as representing the, as it were, dark side of a somewhat unspecified “humanist” tradition also aims to overcome what is seen as the detrimental social and political effects of this tradition. Humanism, and by implication political liberalism, not only link “reason” and “common sense” to straightforward economic “self-interest,” but they are inherently imperialist, relying on “xenophobic,” “undemocratic,” and even “fascist” social imaginaries that give rise to practises of “intolerance” and “epistemic violence” (13–15, 30, 41, 49, 52).5 Leaving aside the short- hand nature of such clichés about European intellectual history, the critical approach of posthumanism and new materialism cannot escape the fact that critique always already entails normative demands. Transforming political and ethical norms, to put it bluntly, requires an understanding of how such norms have been possible in the first place. It is against this background that the current chapter has two goals. First, I will argue that the ethical and political stance of posthumanism and new materialism is self-defeating, even though I am largely sympathetic to their substantive political demands. Second, and in a more positive turn, I will suggest an account of normativity that links political theory and philosophi- cal naturalism, or rather, that seeks to bring philosophical naturalism into political theory without undercutting the latter’s critical import.

Two Claims about Normativity Normativity does not fall from the sky, that much is certain. At least at first sight, it is we, as natural beings, who hold certain things to be normatively valid: a specific constitutional order, for example, or the implications of basic natural laws. Although analytic philosophers occasionally argue that natural laws are not normative in and by themselves, but merely constitute causal relationships that become normative for us as soon as we have a mental representation of such laws, at the very least the consequences of 272 Emden what we regard as natural laws can be normative: you ought not to step out of an airplane mid-flight. This, to be sure, is different from other normative claims that pertain to our ethical commitments, such as you ought not to kill other people, or other natural beings. Despite this apparent difference between epistemic norms about natural laws and ethical norms about kill- ing people, there cannot be any metaphysical difference in terms of their underlying conception of normativity, and normativity refers here to what gives statements, beliefs, things, or circumstances their normatively binding force. What allows for something to become normative is not the same as that which is actually seen to be normative, even though some recent ana- lytical accounts of normativity are marked by this very slippage between normativity and norms.6 While norms certainly have to be normative in that they place certain demands on us, many other things can be normative without, strictly speaking, being norms in the narrow sense of the term. While we could imagine, in a sort of counterfactual way, that norms can exist within a space of reasons within which justification of these norms is possible, normativity always precedes such a space of reasons, or rather, it renders this space of reasons possible in the first place. Seen from this per- spective, normativity can neither be restricted to justification, nor is there anything resembling the practical autonomy of the normative. It is difficult to ignore that we do live in a normative world and that there is simply no escape from normativity (Putnam 1985, 246). When politi- cal theorists criticize a specific normative order—arguing, for example, that neoliberal capitalism hollows out the very idea of democracy—such critique is itself normative, at least in the sense that it implies an alternative form of normative order.7 Otherwise, there would be no need for critique, and per- haps even no need for political theory. Likewise, those who view themselves as subscribing to some form of philosophical naturalism might argue that the natural sciences themselves make no inherently normative claims and instead merely describe causal relationships, but assertions about what and how the natural sciences do whatever they do are indeed normative, because they are based on the assumption of a relatively unified method marked, for instance, by logically coherent induction. Nature doesn’t do logic, but our psychology, in terms of natural mental abilities, allows us to do logic. Then again, hardcore philosophical naturalists would even go as far as not- ing that those mental abilities, and thus also knowledge itself, might best be understood along the lines of natural kinds.8 This would also have to imply that norms and normativity are natural kinds, which raises a pecu- liar problem: appealing to an image of science as providing value-neutral knowledge about what nature really is already entails a set of normative epistemic claims about the unity of scientific knowledge and method that are themselves not derived from the empirical knowledge produced by the sciences. It is precisely in this respect that posthumanism and new material- ism also have to face the question of normativity as it appears in both politi- cal theory and philosophical naturalism. In the same way, however, that Normativity Matters 273 political theory, by and large, often shies away from taking the lessons of philosophical naturalism on board, and vice versa, posthumanism and new materialism often fail to engage in a fruitful dialogue with more mainstream positions in political theory.9 A central task of the present chapter is to bring these different positions into a critical conversation, even though I am ultimately going to argue that posthumanism and new materialism ignore the problem of normativity in a way that seriously undermines their project. We should, I claim, therefore rather focus on rethinking the relationship between philosophical natural- ism and political theory. This broader conclusion of the present chapter is based on two claims about how normativity matters. Reasonably assuming that we can hold epistemic norms and ethical norms because we are natural beings necessarily implies that epistemic and ethical norms differ only to the degree that they gain relevance within different contexts, while there is no difference in kind with regard to what makes them normatively binding in the first place. What provides our epistemic and ethical claims with any binding normative force is that their necessity is the result of the way in which we, as natural beings, are embedded in, and intervene within, causal relationships that we cannot escape all too easily. This first claim also entails a broader second claim: reasonably assuming that normativity does not fall from the sky, and that it is not something which governs our actions and beliefs, judgments and affects from outside, epistemic and ethical norms will have to be seen as emerging within the material conditions, from molecules to the brick and mortar of social institutions, that characterize the world we have to live in. Any account of normativity, thus, requires us to think first and foremost about the question of how normativity is able to emerge, and because we always already live in a normative world, any serious account of the emergence of normativity would also have to show how the political and ethical world in which we engage “intraacts,” to use Joseph Rouse’s and Karen Barad’s term, with our normative conception of what we see as the material conditions and natural contexts of this very world.10 Posthumanists and new materialists all too easily assume that all philosophical naturalism is reductionist.11 In contrast, I will try to provide, in rather broad strokes, a tentative outline of the way in which a specific conception of the emergence of normativity, linked to an uneven ontology of different scales of what we regard as reality, might be able “to translate humanity back into nature,” as Nietzsche (2002) would have it (section 230).

Problems with Normativity The philosophical discussion of normativity is often characterized by the frontlines between phenomenology and naturalism, which themselves can be mapped, in a shorthand way, onto the tense relationship between the continental and analytic traditions. I am not going to follow these particular frontlines in the present chapter, simply because the distinction between 274 Emden continental and analytic philosophy, which has always been somewhat arti- ficial and historically contingent, does not anymore fully reflect the land- scape of the philosophical discussion of normativity.12 Many contemporary philosophical positions that adopt a largely naturalistic stance have strongly been influenced by what continues to be portrayed as a “continental” tra- dition from Spinoza via Hegel to Nietzsche and beyond.13 Instead, as far as the question of normativity is concerned, it might make more sense to argue that contemporary mainstream philosophical thought is marked by a peculiar division of labor between political theory and a more orthodox philosophical naturalism. On the one hand, political theory is concerned with the normative dimen- sion of our ethical commitments and political practices, often itself seeking to provide justification for normatively binding claims about political life. Jürgen Habermas’ conception of deliberative constitutionalism, much like Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic democratic theory, or Philip Pettit’s civic repub- licanism, not only provide us with a description of what they take political life to be, but they also demand of us to rethink the normative order we live in.14 Even Raymond Geuss, who explicitly rejects any political philosophy that puts normative ethics first, accepts that political thought cannot seri- ously be detached from its normative import.15 On the other hand, philosophical naturalism is often presented as a merely descriptive enterprise. Nevertheless, naturalism, traditionally at least, out- lines the normative dimension of the epistemological framework through which the sciences, broadly speaking, understand the world out there, including our own position within the latter. Normativity, on this account, refers to epistemic norms, that is, to a methodological framework that is often assumed to be uniform across the natural sciences and that allows for a fairly accurate understanding of the natural world.16 Norms do not seem to be much of a problem, since they can be dissolved, easily enough, as Willard Van Orman Quine argued, into mental states.17 Alternatively, there simply is no such thing as “real normativity” but merely “normative judgment” in terms of an “attitude” toward the world. Such an attitude is normatively binding if its success is not rooted in beliefs or feeling, but if it is grounded in “logical inferences” and the “inductive method in empirical inquiry” (Leiter 2015, 75–76). On this view, normativity merely constitutes another name for uniform formal principles that allow for the successful application of scientific knowledge. Although both political theory and philosophical naturalism, thus, share a common interest in the question of normativity, in both cases the emer- gence of normativity is often detached from the way in which we, as natural beings, are a constitutive part of the material conditions of whatever we regard as the natural world. From the point of view of political theory, normativity becomes manifest in the procedures, institutions, and actions that make up social life, and the latter are most of the time not seen as in any way related to the way in which we are natural beings. Political life is Normativity Matters 275 what distances us from nature, even though the latter breaks through when political beliefs and actions are shaped by affect and emotions, and this is perhaps more often the case than many political philosophers would like to admit.18 Moreover, conceptions of justice as fairness, or the idea of a right to have rights, are not married to a specific biology. For philosophical naturalists, in turn, statements about, say, the scientific­ accuracy of evolution or the standard model of particle physics, which are based on normative epistemic standards such as inference to the best expla- nation, do not imply a specific ethical commitment. Indeed, statements about nature along these lines only happen to have a normative edge because they primarily describe causal relationships that most naturalists, for good rea- son, would be loath to translate into how people should act politically.19 To put it more pointedly, political theorists can reasonably claim that saving a drowning child requires no commitment to a scientific conception of what we see as the world, while philosophical naturalists can easily note that the epistemic principles allowing for the detection of the Higgs boson say abso- lutely nothing about whether we should provide a safe haven to refugees. That something is normative can mean many different things, of course. It can simply refer to something as being governed by rules or laws, with the latter perhaps implying greater universality than the former. Although we can imagine a world in which certain rules and laws that we, in our daily life, accept as universally normative do not hold, the very fact that alterna- tive norms are possible does not mean that something is less ­normative—at least not necessarily so. At the same time, it intuitively seems to be the case that some norms are, in a certain sense, more normatively binding than oth- ers: the epistemic norms of inference and induction, for instance, that can be regarded as governing our conception of what we call nature, as much as our successful engagement with the latter, are generally held to be valid across a wide range of different contexts, while ethical norms, even though we heuristically hold them to be universal, often vary across such contexts. It would be curious to assume, nevertheless, that both kinds of norms, epis- temic norms and ethical norms, refer to a different kind of normativity. Differences in degree do not imply differences in kind. What unites epis- temic and ethical norms is that we hold these norms, for better or worse, and that we, after all, happen to be natural beings made up of molecules and cells, bacteria and organs, living in environmental niches and intervening through our actions in the niches of which we are a constitutive part. The question is, however, whether a posthumanist ethics, intent on overcoming what appears to be an impasse between political theory and philosophical naturalism, is really able to account for any of this.

Toward Posthumanist Ethics? At the heart of Braidotti’s (2013) account stands the claim that “the com- mon denominator for the posthuman condition is an assumption about 276 Emden the vital, self-organizing and yet non-naturalistic structure of living matter itself.” Living matter is supposed to be “intelligent,” since it is “driven by informational codes” (60). That such a description of life, or living matter, is not entirely unproblematic should be obvious, but blending together an ontologically oriented assertion about what living matter really is with a model that already entails a complex background theory wedded to specific disciplines with their own historical trajectories also highlights that the post- humanist talk about living matter does not remain on the level of ontology. This is also reflected in Braidotti’s conception of life as zoe. The latter refers, on the one hand, to a view of life from the inside, to a vitalist understand- ing of living forces extended equally across all living matter, which stands opposed to the apparent Aristotelian restriction of bios to human beings and higher-order animals. From the perspective of zoe we might all be vegetables, but even vegetables grow, reproduce, consume parts of their environments, and translate the latter into energy, so that zoe ultimately stands in for the conception of “the dynamic, self-organizing structure of life itself” (60). On the other hand, zoe also gains a political dimension in that such a widened notion of life undercuts any implicit hierarchies, or distinctions, between humans, animals, and molecules. As a consequence, Braidotti argues along the lines of Donna Haraway’s earlier discussion of the relationship between humans and animals that there can be, strictly speaking, no animal rights, since the latter extend moral attributes from humans to animals, thus anthropomorphizing what it is to be an animal instead of viewing “the inter- relation human/animal as constitutive of the identity of each” (79). Ontological talk about what living matter is, thus, increasingly turns into a normative direction; statements about what there is already entail an asser- tion about how we ought to see the implications of such ontological talk: “A sustainable ethics for non-unitary subjects rests on an enlarged sense of inter- connection between self and others, including the non-human or ‘earth’ oth- ers, by removing the obstacle of self-centered individualism on the one hand and the barriers of negativity on the other” (190). Such an ethics, moreover, always carries with it a concrete political program: “Zoe-centered egalitari- anism is … a materialist, secular, grounded and unsentimental response to the opportunistic trans-species commodification of life that is the logic of advanced capitalism” (60). Within the framework of Braidotti’s account of posthumanism, zoe serves as “the grounds for posthuman ethics” with “planetary importance” (140 and 172). Directed against both the presumed individualism of political liberalism in the tradition of John Rawls and the universalist claims of Kantian moral law, and of Kantian moral responsi- bility, such a new materialist ethics, however, faces the question of what gives its own claims any normatively binding force. To put it more sharply, Braidotti’s conception of posthumanist ethics is unable to show how any specific position ought to be normative in the first place. As a consequence, “empathy” and “desire” emerge “as core qualities” of a political project, as much as “creativity,” “hopes,” and “aspirations,” which she regards as Normativity Matters 277 crucial characteristics of a “strong sense of collectivity” (26, 49, and 52). What shines through in passages like these is a political romanticism marked by a longing for emotional authenticity, in which monist vitalism and organ- icist collectivism merge into one.20 The refocusing of ethical life onto affect and aesthetic sensibilites that such political romanticism entails threatens to camouflage, as Nancy Fraser (1997) once pointed out, that economic and political injustices are harsh realities rarely, if ever, solved by hopeful appeals. These harsh realities fall by the wayside if responsibility and accountability are simply replaced by “a mode of wonderment that is antecedent to consciousness” (Barad 2007, 391). It is here that the ethical claims of posthumanism lose their normative edge. Demands for “tolerance” and “social justice” are confronted with “an embodied and embedded and hence partial form of accountability” (Braidotti 2013, 49 and 53). How could political or ethical responsibility, or justice, emerge through an ethical practice that “amounts to turning the thinking subject into the threshold of gratuitious (principle of non-profit), aimless (principle of mobility or flow) acts which express the vital energy of transforming becoming (principle of non-linearity)” (166–67)? Mapping ethical norms directly onto an ontology of living matter, in other words, is either surprisingly empty since it does not show how any form of normative order could have emerged, or it serves as a post factum justification for normative claims about ethics or politics that we already hold. Posthumanists like Braidotti (2013) would counter such criticism by pointing out, for example, that the “ethical ideal” of posthumanism consists in actualizing more interconnections with others, including non-human oth- ers, and in “embracing an ethics of experiment” (190 and 194). But why should actualizing such interconnections necessarily be a good thing? And could a random act of killing others not be viewed as a gratuitous and aim- less experiment? That such a posthumanist ethics can indeed lead to irre- sponsible political judgment comes to the fore in Braidotti’s own reference to the Siege of Sarajevo, when her concern is not directed toward the almost 12,000 victims of Serbian artillery and sniper fire but toward “the animals at Sarajevo zoo, which were forcefully freed as a result of NATO bombing and roamed the streets—terrorized and terrifying the humans till they succumbed to friendly fire” (142). If accountability is merely partial, and responsibility only an imperialist Kantian illusion, it is quite possible to excuse the inex- cusable. After all, to give another example, what choice did the Rwandan génocidaires have, driven as they were by the agency of the neoliberal trade in machetes and the history of colonialism? A lack of proportion—resulting­ from a lack of historical understanding that is compensated by moral indig- nation—is a hallmark of posthumanist prose, as in Timothy Morton’s (2013) claim that “climate change as a substitute for global warming is like ‘change in living conditions’ as a substitute for Holocaust” (5). Unlike Braidotti, who seems largely oblivious to the possible consequences of her account of posthumanist ethics, Jane Bennett (2010) recognizes the 278 Emden precarious nature of accountability and responsibility as soon as ­nonhuman agents, or actants, become part of the picture of human agency (32). This becomes of particular concern in the realm of ethics and politics, since accountability, and thus our ability to be responsible for the foreseeable consequences of our actions, is undercut by “a heterogeneous series of act- ants with partial, overlapping, and conflicting degrees of power and effectiv- ity” (33). On the one hand, then, the posthuman ethics of new materialism “presents individuals as simply incabable of bearing full responsibility for their effects,” and on the other, these individuals can still be “the sources of harmful effects” (37). Bennett (2010) herself seeks to counter this impasse by proposing a new model of responsibility that itself is grounded in agency: “Perhaps the ethi- cal responsibility of an individual human now resides in one’s response to the assemblages in which one finds oneself participating: Do I attempt to extricate myself from assemblages whose trajectory is likely to do harm? Do I enter into the proximity of assemblages whose conglomerate effectivity tends toward the enactment of nobler ends?” By short-circuiting responsi- bility with agency, Bennett is certainly able to avoid both the diffusion of accountability that is the upshot of Braidotti’s account and the hyperbolic indignation of Morton’s prose, but she does so by implicitly re-emphasiz- ing the agency of individuals within contexts that are relevant for them: “Agency is … distributed across a mosaic but it is also possible to say some- thing about the kind of striving that may be exercised by a human within the assemblage” (37–38). Bennett realizes that such assumptions directly relate to the problem of normativity: “more needs to be said to specify the normative implications of a vital materialism in specific contexts” (122). Despite this reminder, however, thinking about such normative implications requires a conception of normativity, and the latter is difficult to come by in the context of new materialism and posthumanism.21

How Not to Avoid the Naturalistic Fallacy Braidotti’s account highlights the political pitfalls of a posthumanist ethics that pays little heed to the problem of normativity and even less attention to questions of justification. The ethical stance adopted by a broad range of posthumanist interventions—from new materialism to the farthest reaches of speculative realism, or object-oriented ontology—is either unsurprising or banal: human exceptionalism is overrated, indeed, and the arbitrary exploitation of both human and nonhuman animals is questionable on sev- eral fronts.22 Few will disagree with such claims, but relegating the question of normativity into the background also leads to a conception of ethics, and politics, that is devoid of any real normative import. On such an account, something simply becomes ethical as soon as it becomes a subject of con- cern, and while our environment—from genes to entire habitats—certainly can be an ethical concern, not everything that can become a concern raises Normativity Matters 279 questions of an ethical nature.23 While it is certainly the case that our ethical responsibilities—as far as we can still speak of the latter in consequentialist terms as real responsibilities—cannot seriously be limited to other human animals, it is not entirely unproblematic to reduce the question of ethics to the simple experience of an encounter with others, human and nonhu- man alike, that highlights to us nothing more than the “subtle involvements and relations between more-than-just-human beings” (Smith 2011, xviii). If ethics is really supposed to consist in an activist and creative interaction with others that precludes moral judgment, it does become devoid of any normative relevance and tends toward a romanticizing aestheticization of the other.24 Such a romanticizing stance particularly comes to the fore when posthumanism takes on environmentalist concerns but replaces, for instance, arguments about marine pollution with a poetic description of deep-sea life whose main contention is that, somehow, we are all of oceanic origins.25 Real and justified concerns about global warming are another prominent example for such an ethical stance, but if the posthumanist thesis of a flat monist ontology does indeed hold water, there is no reason to assume that global warming is not simply part of the system, as it were.26 From a political perspective, flat monist ontologies lead to a diffusion of responsibility which ultimately turns against those posthumanist interven- tions that, in the name of emancipation, seek to hold a modern, human- ist subjectivity responsible for gender inequality, factory livestock farming, global warming, and the ills of neoliberal capitalism.27 In the end, it might even be the case, as Bennett (2015) suggested most recently, that new mate- rialism would have “to forego the category of the political as such” (84). Although this might be pressing the point too far, it might not be possible anymore to differentiate between, say, the production of udon noodles and presidential elections, and if that should really be the case, then the demands of posthumanism and new materialism might neither be ethically, nor poli- ticially, relevant. While the consequences of posthumanism’s and new materialism’s ethi- cal stance thus appear questionable by their own standards, what is at stake is not simply a lack of theoretical coherence. Rather, in the background of political pitfalls and ethical vagueness stands a more serious philosophical problem, that of the naturalistic fallacy. For any posthumanist or new mate- rialist ethics, the naturalistic fallacy proves fatal. This problem becomes par- ticularly obvious in a central claim—summarized in exemplary fashion by Karen Barad—that shapes the ethical and political outlook of posthuman- ism and new materialism at large. Relating the agency of matter directly to the question of ethics, Barad draws on Emmanuel Levinas’ understanding of ethics as a first philosophy grounded in the immediate phenomenological experience of encountering “the other.” The other, Levinas (1969) argues, is revealed in its “alterity” to the “I” and thus creates an “irreducible rela- tionship” that is centered on our immediate response to the other, which he understands as the basis of ethical responsibility (150 and 7980). While 280 Emden Levinas is far from being a materialist philosopher, he does suggest that our relationship to the “material world” can, in principle, repeat the structural logic of “I” and “the other”: “The primordial relation of man with the mate- rial world is not negativity, but enjoyment and agreeableness of life,” and it is this move that allows Barad (1996) to translate Levinas’ theologically oriented assumptions into her account of an “ethics of mattering”(Levinas 1969, 49; and Barad 1996, 391–96). Ethics emerges in the agential dynam- ics inherent in matter, which includes the human subject as constituted by its material agency. As a consequence, “the human subject is not … the locus of ethicality,” but ethical relationships are always part of the agency of matter. Ethics, then, is not really concerned with norms but rather with the “rela- tionalities of becoming of which we are a part” (Barad 1996, 393). While it might certainly be possible to describe the emergence of normativity along these lines, Barad goes much further, concluding that all material agency is essentially of an ethical kind, since “[m]atter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the ‘Other’” (393). Since all material agency is reciprocal, in one way or another, it does “respond” to other kinds of agency, and since agency thus entails “the ability to respond to the other,” Barad defines “responsibility” in terms of responsiveness (392). Short-circuiting Levinas’ theological ethics of the other with the monist ontology of new materialism ultimately gives rise to metaphysical claims that withdraw from justification: “A delicate tissue of ethicality runs through the marrow of being. There is no getting away from ethics—mattering is an integral part of the ontology of the world in its dynamic presencing” (Barad 1996, 396). Of course, if everything is somehow ethical as long as it is con- cerned with material agency, then any ethical claim could potentially be accepted: human cruelty might just be an agential manifestation “intrinsic to the world’s vitality,” and the agents of cruelty might very well merely be “responsive to the possibilities that might help [them] flourish,” since they are, after all, “alive to the possibilities of becoming” (396). It might be the case that Barad’s conception of ethicality as inscribed into the agency of matter is simply the result of the metaphorical quality of the theoretical language she employs, leaping from responsiveness to responsi- bility. But the philosophical problem that looms large in the background of the theoretical assumptions made by posthumanism and new materialism is the danger of the naturalistic fallacy: that, as natural beings, we respond to the world of which we are a constitutive part through our practices does not yet say anything as to whether any of these practices can be viewed as morally good, or as morally objectionable, for that matter. Ethical norms— “you ought to do X because it is morally good”—neither can be derived from the fact that “doing X” lies within the realm of possible actions that natural beings can undertake, nor can ethical norms be reductively derived from the natural properties, or affects, that “doing X” might engender, such as the feeling that “doing X” is pleasurable.28 It is, in other words, not pos- sible to derive norms from facts in any straightforward way, in the same Normativity Matters 281 way that it would be absurd to argue that the fact of genetic drift calls for, say, direct democracy, even though the natural beings that might engage in direct democracy, or any other form of political practice, are, as a popula- tion, inevitably subject to genetic drift as long as they reproduce—for better or worse. We might doubt that the naturalistic fallacy constitutes, properly speak- ing, a logical fallacy; it can simply be viewed as a category mistake that confuses the properties of horses with those of oranges, or it might simply be a fallacious, that is, bad argument.29 At the same time, the implication of what I have described as the naturalistic fallacy, as soon as it is translated from a simple normatively valid assertion to a complex argument with nor- matively binding force, at least tends toward two different kinds of what are understood to be informal fallacies: the petitio principii, in which the conclusion is already entailed in the premise, and the fallacy of equivoca- tion, in which the metaphorical ambiguity of a particular concept allows for two different meanings that are conflated in the conclusion. Barad’s claim that the responsiveness of matter itself entails ethical responsibility falls into the latter category, while Braidotti’s (2013) argument that a conception of matter and life as “intelligent and self-organizing” is ethically preferable to traditional humanism falls into the former category (35). In contrast to the posthumanist ethical stance outlined above, traditional forms of philosophical naturalism and mainstream political theory of the Kantian kind have delivered accounts of normativity that, albeit in very dif- ferent ways, seek to avoid the trap of deriving norms from nature. However, both tend to separate the normative from the natural. There can be many different conceptions of philosophical naturalism. Nevertheless, they all tend to share two basic assumptions: any real knowl- edge about the world can only come from our scientific engagement with the world and human beings are no special case vis à vis the rest of whatever we regard as nature. A particularly prominent strand of philosophical natural- ism holds, first of all, that epistemic statements about the world are valid only if they are based on a logically coherent methodology that constitutes a normative standard independent of the scientific practices that have led to these epistemic statements about the world—what Rudolf Carnap views as the logical syntax of the language of science and Quine calls “the fundamen- tal conceptual scheme of science and common sense.”30 Secondly, norms are a matter of cognitive psychology in that they can count as assertions with an illocutionary force and merely represent non-reducible psychological states. The epistemic norms of science belong to a “chapter of psychology” (Quine 1969, 83). As long as norms are seen as mental states, and not as qualitative natural kinds, philosophical naturalism avoids the naturalistic fallacy, but it also has to face the question of what makes these norms possible in the first place. Such an account of philosophical naturalism has not gone unchallenged, even though it is safe to say that it remains somewhat of an orthodoxy in the 282 Emden Anglo-American analytic tradition.31 As far as the question of normativity is concerned, it leads to two central problems. First, the reduction of episte- mology to cognitive psychology invariably ignores that human psychology is not an autonomous domain. Mental states are not simply there, but they are embedded in our biological and physiological makeup as natural beings, with all that entails, including our evolutionary history. This, of course, also implies that the way in which we talk about these mental states, and how we conceive of our psychology, is necessarily shaped by the contexts of which we, as natural beings, are a constitutive part. Biology, broadly speaking, constrains, but also enables, whatever is possible for us, even if biology lacks relevance for the questions we are facing: our second nature, in other words, is never fully detached from our first nature, but the latter is often simply not relevant for the questions we have to address in the realm of our ethical deci- sions and political commitments.32 That our ethical norms are not reducible to physical properties does not at all imply that what gives these norms any binding force is not shaped by what we are as natural beings, but it does allow for the recognition that it might simply be silly to assume that only those norms can be binding which can be experimentally verified.33 Second, the kind of orthodox philosophical naturalism outlined above assumes that only those claims can be normatively binding that adhere to, or can be represented by, a specific understanding of scientific method based on induction that is identical across all scientific domains and disciplines. The normatively binding force of this scientific method itself, however, thus remains outside whatever it seeks to explain, verify, and represent, that is, it can only be successful if it is thought to be detached from the practices with which the sciences intervene in a world of which they are a constitutive part. Normativity, on this view, serves as a kind of standard against which to measure whether our epistemic claims about the world are justified, but it fails to recognize that this standard itself must be part of what it seeks to measure. While traditional forms of philosophical naturalism refrain from natu- ralizing their own commitments, political theory, on the other hand, disre- gards the ontological commitments of naturalism to its own disadvantage. Although political philosophers—especially if they situate themselves in a Kantian tradition—will argue that the justification of moral action requires an epistemologically normative framework that allows us to make this justi- fication, this normative framework is largely seen in terms of formal princi- ples and procedures of justification that do not require any reference to our existence as natural beings. Political philosophers cannot seriously argue that moral action is able to take place without some kind of knowledge about the latter’s consequences, or without knowledge about the space within which moral action takes place, but discussions of ethical normativity are generally detached from ontological concerns. Christine M. Korsgaard (1996), for instance, might accept that, somehow, we hold moral commitments as natu- ral beings that happen to have a certain biology, since otherwise there would Normativity Matters 283 be no entity that could hold moral commitments in the first place, but moral commitments are neither natural kinds nor can they be seen as descriptive of the world we live in. Instead, “[t]hey make claims on us; they command, oblige, recommend, or guide” (Korsgaard 1996, 8). As such, they are differ- ent from other claims that we make about the world and that do not oblige us to act in a particular way. Statements about evolution, genetic drift, phe- notypic plasticity, or string theory, are in this respect different from asser- tions about what we ought to do if faced, in public as much as in private life, with decisions about how we should conduct ourselves. From Korsgaard’s perspective we are bound to fall into the trap of the naturalistic fallacy as soon as we disregard this distinction and think that the normative and the natural are one and the same.34 Along these Kantian lines, Rawls’ argument for justice as fairness as a central political virtue, for instance, or his emphasis on the function of constitutional essentials for pluralist democracy, simply do not require any coherent account of human beings qua natural beings, and any such account would indeed threaten the way in which self-authenticating individ- uals are central to Rawls’ conception of political liberalism.35 Likewise, for Habermas’ discourse ethics, normativity constitutes a primarily formal rela- tionship, even though the latter is also historically situated. Nevertheless, what makes for a “valid norm” has little to do with nonhuman factors but rests on the shoulders of rational autonomous individuals: all those who are affected by the “general observance” of such a norm must simply be able to “accept the consequences and side effects” that the observance of this norm “can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone’s interests,” at least as long as “these consequences are preferred to those of known alterna- tive possibilites” (Habermas 1990, 65). The communicative action through which norms gain validity might always be embedded “in lifeworld con- texts,” but with increasing social complexity communicative action neces- sarily becomes “autonomous,” so that the members of the polity will have to come to some kind of understanding “about the normative regulation of strategic interactions” beyond the threshold of mere affect (Habermas 1996, 25–27). Valid norms, in other words, require rational justification by autonomous persons, even though such justification is always a dynamic process since the general observance of those norms that we hold to be valid cannot anticipate all possible consequences (58–59 and 162). Regardless of the dynamics with which the validity of norms needs to be justified for different contexts of ahistorically contingent lifeworlds, eth- ics and morality are detached from our existence as natural beings. This is particularly the case as soon as we distinguish ethics as dealing with con- crete and particular problems from the more general and formal principles that are seen to govern the normative order of morality, as Rainer Forst (2012) points out.36 Morality, on this view, consists of “a system of cat- egorically binding norms, and corresponding rights and duties, which hold reciprocally and universally among human beings qua human beings in their 284 Emden capacity as moral persons, and which do not presuppose any thicker context of interpersonal or communal relations (such as family, friends, political community, and so on)” (Forst 2012, 43). There are, of course, specific and understandable reasons why political philosophy has refrained from extending its conception of normativity to include nonhuman factors and agents. Deriving the structure of normativ- ity as categorically and universally binding among human individuals from any natural facts about these individuals would fall into the trap of the naturalistic fallacy. Moreover, reducing normative action to natural agency can give rise to a crude social Darwinism that, from the vantage point of critical theory, has done considerable damage to the emancipatory claims of political philosophy and that, from a historical perspective, has under- mined democratic pluralism, as in the case of a biologically grounded rac- ism. Most importantly, however, extending normativity beyond the human world undercuts the presumed practical autonomy of reason that allows for the rational justification of ethical and political claims about the world in which we have to live. Habermas (2003) in particular worries that introducing naturalism into political philosophy will invariably lead to a physicalist reductionism that deflates the importance of normativity and denies the relevance of ethics as a specifically human domain.37 This problem comes to the fore especially in the context of biotechnology, which blurs “the dividing line between the nature we are and the organic equipment we gave ourselves” (Habermas 2003, 22). The problem is not, however, that we are able, for instance through gene manipulation, to give ourselves different organic equipment, since our ability to do so would indeed highlight our autonomy to step out- side our own evolutionary history. Rather, the problem is that by doing so we reduce ourselves to genetically determined organisms that have no need for rational justification, since whatever we might experience as the rational justification of the norms we hold is in any case a manifestation and out- come of our genetic makeup. The promises of biotechnology always entail a physicalist reductionism that Habermas counters by demanding greater emphasis on “an ethical self-understanding of the species which is crucial for our capacity to see ourselves as the authors of our own life histories” and which allows us “to recognize one another as autonomous persons” (25). As soon as we give up on this autonomy, Habermas assumes, we also give up on democratic pluralism in the polity. While Kantian political philosophy and ethics along the lines of Rawls and Korsgaard disregards, for instance, biology and evolution for obvious reasons, the failure of Frankfurt School critical theory to account for the nor- mative import of nonhuman lifeworlds appears particularly perplexing from a posthumanist perspective, since the latter still largely shares the emancipa- tory ideals of critical theory. Bruno Latour, for instance, has faulted criti- cal theory for its constructivist and representationalist underpinnings that exclude nature from the realm of politics.38 This situation is more complex, Normativity Matters 285 however, since already Habermas hinted at the contextual dynamics of rational justification, and more recently Forst (2012) pointed out that the Kantian conception of morality sets aside a “whole range of normative con- texts” that are relevant outside this conception (44). Normativity, in other words, is not coextensive with morality, or ethics for that matter, and “we should not rule out the possibility that there may exist a plurality of sources of normativity” (44). While Forst might not explicitly include nonhuman agency among these sources, nothing really prevents us from doing so, and in the uneven ontology of our normative world, rational justification can happily exist in an intraactive relationship with other kinds of agency, prac- tices, and patterns.39

The Scales of Normativity That our practical experience of the normative world might only be mean- ingful because it entails an uneven ontology suggests that it might not be unreasonable to assume that there are different scales of normativity and that the intraaction among these scales is what gives some things a more normatively binding force than others. Seen from this perspective, the merit of posthumanist ethics might very well be its call to rethink the barriers that both Kantian political philosophy and traditional forms of philosophical naturalism have created between the ontological, the epistemological, and the ethical.40 As Barad (2007) clearly shows, the production of scientific knowledge through specific practices does not lead to a representation of nature but instead rests on “direct material engagement with the world,” so much so that the phenomena under observation—quarks, microbes, gene families—consist of inseparable, intra-acting components and their agency, which necessarily includes the experimental setting and the position of the observer (49, emphasized in original).41 Quarks, microbes, and genes come into existence through what Barad describes as “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies,” which not only implies that such phenomena, or “epistemic things,” cannot be separated from the context within which, and through which, they emerge, but also that our epistemic claims about the world of which we are a constitutive part cannot be separated from their own ontological status (33, emphasized in original).42 Our epistemic claims are the result of knowing as a “distributed practice that includes the larger material arrangement” within which our epistemic claims can gain norma- tively binding force: “Knowing is … a practice of intra-acting with the world as part of the world in its dynamic material configuring, its ongoing articula- tion” (379). For Barad, to be sure, this automatically implies that such an “ontology of knowing” is coupled to an “ethics of mattering,” because our ethical claims are, as much as our epistemic claims, inseparable from a wider context of material agency (36). Since this leads Barad’s argument, as I have noted above, straight into the naturalistic fallacy, it will be best to leave the question of ethics aside. Indeed, taking ethics out of Barad’s version of 286 Emden materialism shows that the position she describes as “agential realism” does entail fruitful lessons for an account of the emergence of normativity that is able to avoid the pitfalls of the naturalistic fallacy. Central to Barad’s (2007) agential realism is not the posthumanist adage that, in both science and daily life, “nonhumans play an important role in naturecultural practices,” but rather that, as she emphatically points out, “we are a part of that nature that we seek to understand” (32 and 67). It is the latter that allows her to reject, for good reason, the representa- tionalist approach of traditional forms of philosophical naturalism (134).43 Knowledge does not stand outside whatever we describe as nature, and nei- ther do the epistemic norms we subscribe to for one reason or another, but what we regard as knowledge always constitutes a set of practices that not only intervene in what we see as nature but also alter what we see as nature, including our own existence as natural beings. The physical characteristics of disease, for instance, are affected by a broader network that includes the interactions among biological, environmental, and social factors as well as human behavior, while recent work in genomics has emphasized a similar perspective.44 Seen against this background, Barad’s “agential realist ontol- ogy” appears less far-fetched than if viewed from the vantage point of its vague ethical claims. At its core it merely entails the assumption that “the ‘human’ and its others are differentially delineated and defined,” which allows her to propose an extended conception of agency that is not exclu- sively connected to human intentionality (136–41 and 235). Barad’s rejection of the link between agency and intentionality is not without reason. Philosophical naturalism in the analytical tradition has largely, albeit not exclusively, discussed agency within the context of a philosophy of action for which free will, causality, goal-oriented behavior, and intentionality play a crucial role.45 The broader recognition that most instances of distinctly human agency are not necessarily causal, or related to either intentionality or desire, has entered the analytic discussion only fairly recently.46 Sociologists have, for quite some time, modeled forms of agency that do not require straightforward causality, for instance, as far as the behavior of larger groups are concerned.47 It is, however, a minimalist conception of agency that highlights the need for an extended understanding of agency across the spectrum of human and nonhuman things.48 Inasmuch as, say, bacteria respond to a specific environment in very specific ways, and not in others, they can be said not only to exhibit agency, but even to exhibit agency in a normative way. Seen from this perspective, Barad’s (2007) claim that human beings, as natural beings, and their practices are a constitutive “part of the larger material configuration of the world and its ongoing open- ended articulation,” does not at all imply that agency excludes normativity (379).49 Being part of the larger material configuration, consciously or not, still means that we, as natural beings, respond to our biological niches, our evolutionary history, and our physiological makeup in specific ways at spe- cific times—ways that are inherently constrained. Normativity Matters 287 Barad generally avoids talk of norms and normativity. At the same time, her account of agential realism, and the ontological commitments that come along with the latter, do indeed overlap with some current developments in philosophical naturalism that show a clear interest in the question of normativity. These developments, broadly speaking, extend a line of argu- ment that goes back to Wilfrid Sellars’ account of how the justification of our normative claims about the world invariably has to rely on a broad range of non-epistemic things, experiences, motives, affects, and forms of human agency.50 Our conception of what we regard as normative should thus always be embedded in, and cannot be fully distinguished from, the concrete contextual circumstances in which we find ourselves. These con- texts, needless to say, include the evolutionary history of the niche in which we, as natural beings, engage in the world, they entail the agency of other natural beings, broadly conceived, and our material, that is, bodily embed- dedness in such niches.51 As a consequence, the epistemic claims about the world which we regard as normative, and therefore as justified, “conform to no single or simple pattern,” as Sellars (1997) noted, but constitute “a tangle of intersecting dimensions” that, going beyond Sellars’ mainly episte- mological point, will have to include the stuff that makes us natural beings, from cells and molecules to entire biological traits (80). Political theory will do well to take such a more naturalistic perspec- tive seriously. Although it would be absurd not to grant political theory some kind of anthropocentric perspective, and not to assume that success- ful participation in the polity requires some form of “deliberative compe- tence,” the norms that guide our actions in responding to some kind of public harm or problem rarely gain their normatively binding force exclu- sively from rational deliberation (Bennett 2010, 103 and 107). Rather, as Bennett reminds us, rational deliberation and the demands for justification are always embedded in a specific context that is marked to a considerable extent by nonhuman factors: “A coffee house or a school house is a mobile configuration of people, insects, orders, ink, electrical flows, air currents, caffeine, tables, chairs, fluids, and sounds,” which—taken as a whole—can certainly affect and shape our normative response to what we are able to see as a politically relevant issue similar to the way in which the intake of certain kinds of foods, nutrients or chemicals is certainly able to affect our moods and decisions (35).52 Integrating nonhuman actors into political theory, however, does not necessarily have to lead to the kind of flat monist ontology that takes center stage in Braidotti’s and Barad’s ethical stance. Politics and ethics instead take place in an “ontological field” with complex forms of differentiation that simply widen our understanding of the ways in which something can become normatively binding.53 The unevenness of such an ontological field, in which actants lack perfect equality since they are not all relevant at the same time, is also able to avoid the trap of the naturalistic fallacy that characterizes standard accounts of posthumanist ethics: political systems are not ecosystems, and constitutional law and extraparliamentary 288 Emden protest cannot be mapped onto the behavior of worms in the Amazonian rainforest.54 However, as soon as we insert the question of normativity into this relationship, the picture becomes more complicated: whether we should value democracy, or whether we should favor redistributive taxation, can- not be answered by an appeal to the molecular structure of our cells, but that such claims can become normative in the first place—that they are pos- sible for us, but not exactly relevant for the life of dolphins—does depend on what we are as natural beings. Extending the normative force of the factual to nonhuman things and forms of agency, without giving up on an uneven ontology that limits what can be counted as relevant for ethics and politics, entails a revisionist account of normativity: while the processes of cell formation and cell sign- aling remain normatively binding for human beings as natural beings even when they engage in a public discussion about the intricacies of the US tax code, that they are normatively binding is simply not relevant within the latter context. At the same time, their normatively binding force allows the existence of natural beings which, for better or worse, are able to discuss the intricacies of the US tax code because they are characterized by a specific physiologoical and biological makeup. If it is not unreasonable to assume that what gives our claims about reality some kind of normatively binding force cannot be detached from what makes us natural beings marked by a specific evolutionary history and phenotypic plasticity, without reducing norms to natural facts, then it might be possible to distinguish among differ- ent scales of normativity.55 For the present purpose, I would argue for three different scales of normativity, adding that the relationships among these scales are of an intraactive kind. First of all, there is a scale of normativity that entails constraints of a bio- logical or physical kind that occur, for instance, on the level of the genome or cellular processes. This scale of the normative world extends across all organisms, from plants and fungi to bacteria and mammals, including humans. Although the ontology of plants is not flat, the ontological expe- rience of higher order animals, including humans, is of a different kind, since it is necessarily also marked by a second scale of normativity that entails reflexive standards of affective evaluation, such as “advantageous” and “disadvantageous,” “good” and “bad,” “useful” and “useless,” etc. Normativity becomes manifest at this scale largely in terms of non-cognitive emotional responses and reflexes but also through learned and conditioned forms of behavior, even though affective evaluation can also take on rather complex forms, as in the case of altruism among humans and some other animals. Affects and moods that are, to a considerable extent, also depend- ent on the circumstances and niches in which animals find themselves, cer- tainly embed normativity at this scale in both nonhuman and non-living contexts, from atmospheric conditions and environmental chemicals to hormones and neurotransmitters. Normativity, at this scale, can thus be said to supervene upon both material circumstances and normativity at the Normativity Matters 289 biological, or physical, scale: changes at different scales cannot be reduced to the properties of other scales, but any changes that occur at one scale necessarily lead to changes at other scales.56 Although the example of learned altruism suggests a link between the normatively binding forces at this scale and much more complex kinds of ethical behavior, such as taking responsibility for the foreseeable conse- quences of one’s actions, the latter really become manifest only at a third scale of normativity that is not specific to plants, fungi, and nonhuman ani- mals. At this third scale of normativity, moral and epistemic norms, ethical virtues, but also constitutional law or social institutions, begin to govern those kinds of agency that allow for responsibilites, duties, and obligations as much as for the emergence of rights, including the right to justification. Normativity, at this scale, furthermore exhibits a specific materiality that is qualitatively unique to human animals and comes to the fore in archives and paperwork, in buildings, workflows, procedures, and discursive regimes. While we might attribute moral behavior to nonhuman animals, in par- ticular to primates, primate researchers tend to ignore that morality is more than mere cooperation and sympathy in much the same way as Kantian moral philosophers forget that following up on one’s obligations often tends to rely on more than mere reason.57 Bonobos and chimpanzees, much like prairie voles and bacteria, simply do not engage in the complex production of the paper and knowledge required, for instance, in the making of legal statutes.58 My daughter’s cat complains and demurs, but does not deliver petitions for more milk signed by the local commonwealth of feline activ- ists. To be sure, the materialities of human normativity do encroach upon elephants, fungi, and plankton as soon as roads are built, forests cut down, or pollutants released into the atmosphere by cars. But moral and ethical norms are not a property of forests. It is in this respect that normativity on this third scale, which is relevant primarily for human animals, allows us to make those kinds of choices that, despite being inherently limited, are simply not possible at other scales of normativity. On the other hand, the kind of normative forces that are directly relevant for the ways in which we, still as natural beings, conduct our lives in a pluralist polity also place greater constraints on us and restrict the space of our possible actions, for good reason. What political philosophers like Habermas and Forst, thus, view in terms of morality, refers to, and is relevant, only at a specific scale of normativity, but that anything can become normatively binding at this scale would be the emergent outcome of normativity at other scales. Among these different scales of normativity, the biological and physiological manifestations of nor- mativity seem particularly problematic, since they do not stand in any direct relationship with, and do not determine, what we generally understand to be our ethical and political commitments. Nevertheless, the bacterial pro- duction of enzymes, for instance, and thus bacterial growth, is not a random and haphazard event. Encountering both glucose and lactose, bacteria, such 290 Emden as E. coli, will inevitably first choose glucose for the production of specific enzymes, but should glucose be used up, they do eventually switch over to lactose, generating a different kind of enzyme. This form of enzyme adapta- tion is marked by a weak, or loose, linkage among bacteria, glucose, and lactose, since bacteria are able to switch between the latter two if necessary, but it is also a normative linkage in that bacteria do not switch randomly between glucose and lactose.59 Instead, as long as bacteria rely on glucose for enzyme production, the availability of glucose inhibits bacteria from metab- olizing lactose even if their genome contains a lactose operon—a specific cluster of genes—since the transport of glucose blocks the lactose inducer.60 This regulatory mechanism has a direct effect on bacterial growth, because the kind of enzymes produced determine, for instance, the metabolic path- ways in entire cells and thus affect the shape of the cell. Enzyme adaptation can thus be seen as an example for the transforma- tion of randomness (availability of glucose and lactose) to necessity, since the process itself triggers normatively binding consequences for cells and thus increasingly generates biological order.61 Cellular processes, such as cell signaling, are themselves dependent on the spatial distribution of molecules within the cell, which in turn is determined by the shape of the cell itself, including the size of its subcellular compartments, so that also the spatial arrangements within cells can be said to exert a normatively binding force upon cell signaling.62 Such signaling, needless to say, is not limited to single cells, but it also targets adjacent cells and cells that happen to be in the vicin- ity of each other, while endocrine signaling even allows for the hormonal targeting of distant cells. A similar shift from randomness to normative order can be observed with regard to the dynamics of microtubules within cells, that is, dynamic tubes of polymers that consist of two proteins and can be found in eukaryotic cells. The growth and shrinking of microtubules as part of the cytoskeleton creates a dynamic instability through which cells are able to gain their spe- cific shape.63 When microtubules encounter stabilizing factors at the periph- ery of the cell they persist in their size; the more this takes place, the more the cell gains its specific shape. If the emerging cell shape is both non-lethal for the organism and sufficiently robust, the cytoskeleton becomes stabilized and allows for specific kinds of cell signaling.64 Although the way in which microtubules grow and shrink constitutes a random exploratory process, once the cytoskeleton is stabilized, the consequences of random exploration become normatively binding for the organism as a whole. In these exam- ples for a biological scale of normativity, natural processes do not lead to a specific outcome that can be determined in advance, since, for instance, the same genotype can lead to different cell shapes. The processes themselves merely allow for the possibility that some outcomes will be normative, while others will not. What is encoded by the genome, then, “is the means to explore, not the outcome of the exploration,” in the same way that traits are not inherited but merely the means to develop these traits (Kirschner Normativity Matters 291 and Gerhart 2005, 155 and 178). Normativity on a biological scale does not entail determinism, and certainly not any kind of purposiveness, since natu- ral selection, adaptation, and variation, together with random circumstances and effects, increase the amount of heritable information and therefore the number of possible normative outcomes. Normativity, in other words, is an enabling factor, but what it enables is, at the same time, constrained by the evolutionary history of the organism as much as by the niche in which it exists and its relationship to other members of this niche. The consequences of such processes are wider macroevolutionary pat- terns as in the case of convergent evolution: the same biological traits can be found among vastly different species as a response to similar, path-depend- ent evolutionary histories and niches. Penguins and whales, for instance, have a similar amount of the protein myoglobin which binds oxygen and successively releases the latter to muscle tissue. Only because of this con- vergent evolution are mammals, birds, and reptiles who live in, or near, water able to stay submerged for prolonged periods, and similar forms of convergent evolution can be observed with regard to echolocation and skin pigmentation.65 Normativity, then, might be best understood as the emergence of binding and path-dependent patterns across different domains of the living world that, on the one hand, constrain the kind of development that is possible for natural beings, broadly conceived, and on the other, nevertheless enable a space of possibilities within which natural beings are able to develop.66 The emergence of such patterns, as Joseph Rouse pointed out, “continually reshapes the situations in which agents live and understand themselves,” so that normativity does not give rise to norms and laws “independent of us and our concerns, but phenomena that we are part of.”67 Normativity provides the binding force for whatever we regard as moral and epistemic norms. The latter neither fall from the sky, nor are they properties of any- thing out there, but they emerge through the agential and intraactive rela- tionships within which we have to live as a specific species in specific niches with their own histories.68 The way in which normativity, on this account, is part of evolutionary history enables us to understand how some norms of a moral and epistemic kind can undergo change, while others do not change, or change only very slowly. Not all normative patterns, of course, are relevant at all times and at all scales. Some, especially those of a biologi- cal kind, are present at all scales, but that something exists, or is present, does not at all mean that it has any relevance, or that it is able to gain any meaning. Normativity does not entail a flat, or monist, ontology; we should rather think along the lines of an uneven and pluralist ontology. The revisionist conception of normativity outlined above is able to avoid the pitfalls of the naturalistic fallacy that marrs the ethical stance of both posthumanism and traditional philosophical naturalism, but at the same time it is still able to account for the relevance of those concerns that take center stage in political theory, even if the latter is of a Kantian kind. There 292 Emden is, one might point out, nothing wrong with Kantian political philosophy as long as we recognize that the idea of self-authenticating individuals, the idea of the autonomy of reason, or the notion of a right to justification, are able to gain normatively binding force as part of a wider context of normative patterns at different scales, many of which are simply not relevant to actual- ize, say, moral obligations, in a meaningful way. In this respect, it might very well be meaningful to assume, in a sort of fic- tionalist manner, the existence of self-authenticating individuals as a source for normative claims, even though, at a different normative scale, such indi- viduals simply do not exist. The crucial point, however, is not that we are, as it were, lying to ourselves if we assume the existence of self-­authenticating individuals, but rather that the intraaction among different scales of nor- mativity allows us, as natural beings, to derive from the assumption of self-authenticating individuals qua moral persons normatively binding com- mitments and obligations that are able to make the niches within which we engage with others more robust. Much to the horror, perhaps, of the proponents of a posthumanist ethics, even humanism, despite its dark side, can thus be seen as functional in a broadly speaking evolutionary sense. Otherwise we would not have been able to subscribe to its central tenets, such as the autonomy of reason, so successfully and for such a long time; it is, after all, humanism itself, through its failure, that is able to give rise to questions suggestive of a need to rethink our ethical commitments vis à vis nonhuman agents. Since there is no way for us, as natural beings, to escape normativity, and since it is simply nonsense to deny that we are natural beings, any serious account of normativity must be of a naturalistic kind. At the same time, not everything that is normatively binding happens to be relevant for all con- texts of life. Normativity matters, however, because without it we could not make any claims about the world at all, not engage within the world at all, nor understand how we can make such claims or become engaged in a vari- ety of practices that make us, as natural beings, qualitatively different from bacteria. Normativity also matters, however, in the sense that we require an account of normativity across what we can regard, even if only heuristically, as different scales of the natural life we happen to lead. Both philosophical naturalism and political theory will do well to take this into account in their respective conceptions of what can reasonably be seen as belonging to the normative order we live in.

Notes 1 See, for instance, most recently, Forst 2015, 9–33. 2 Along similar lines, see Haraway 2003 and Wolfe 2012a. 3 The posthumanist slippage between “normative,” on the one hand, and negative descriptions of what is culturally constructed as “normal” (the normal body, nor- mal sexuality, etc.), on the other, is indeed difficult to overlook. See, for instance, Normativity Matters 293 Nayar 2013, 18 and 101; Chen 2012, 78 and 106–107; Wolfe 2010, xvii and 136; Hayles 2008, 196, 201, and 220. 4 Despite this ontological difference between historical materialism and new materialism, Bennett (2010) highlights that the latter is still influenced by, and continues, the political concerns of historical materialism (xvi and 62). On the interdependence of new materialism and posthumanism, see Coole and Frost 2010, 7–15; and Braidotti 2013, 51. 5 Braidotti’s account ostensibly relies on Tony Davis’ (1997) Humanism, but the latter develops a far more complex and balanced assessment of the con- ceptual history of humanism that is rarely compatible with Braidotti’s own account. 6 See, for instance, Leiter 2015. 7 See, for instance, Brown 2015. 8 See, perhaps most famously, Churchland 1988 and Kornblith 2002. 9 A notable exception is Frost 2008. 10 See, for instance, Rouse 2002, 20 and 227. The term “intraaction,” which Rouse takes from Karen Barad (1996), signifies that the boundaries between us and the world of which we are part are porous, shifting, and can only serve, at best, as a heuristic device. 11 See, for instance, Wolfe 2003, 190. 12 In this chapter I am not going to engage any further with the phenomenological discussion of normativity. For the latter, see rather Crowell 2013. 13 Among the most prominent examples of this kind of philosophical naturalism are Haugeland 1998, and McDowell 1996 and 2009. 14 See, for example, Habermas 1996, Mouffe 2005, and Pettit 2012. 15 See, for instance, Geuss 2008, 16 and 37–42. 16 See, for instance, Carnap 1938, 42–62, and Causey 1977. For the alternative view, see Hacking 1996 and Dupré 1996a. 17 See, for instance, Quine 1969, 69–90. 18 See, for instance, from different perspectives Protevi 2009 and Stewart 2007. See also the contributions in Thompson and Hoggett 2012. 19 On the primacy of description over normativity in such cases, see, for instance, Lipton 2004, 131–32. 20 As two recent commentators noted, such a position might turn out to be even more restrictive than any Kantian categorical imperative. While the latter is lim- ited to autonomous subjects, it almost seems that new materialism’s and post- humanism’s collective of human and nonhuman things introduces a categorical imperative that extends to everything imaginable. See Washick and Wingrove 2015, 71–74. 21 One recent attempt to address this issue draws on Gilles Deleuze’s work and sug- gests the notion of a “nomadic normativity,” but it might rightly be asked why, under such circumstances, anything should have normative force at all. See the introduction to Braidotti and Pisters 2012, 1–8. 22 See, for instance, Haraway 2008 and Wolfe 2012b. 23 See, however, Alaimo 2008. 24 See, for instance, the example of MacCormack 2012. 25 See, for instance, Alaimo 2013 and 2014. 26 This is the underlying logical problem of Timothy Morton’s (2010) account in The Ecological Thought. 27 See, along similar lines, Krause 2011, although I am less sure whether responsi- bility really requires as strong a notion of “selfhood” as Krause seems to suggest. 28 See Moore 1993, 61–69 (I. 10). Although it is commonplace to distinguish between the naturalistic fallacy and fallacious appeals to nature, there are good 294 Emden arguments to be made that the latter—e.g., “the moral goodness of X derives from the existence of X”—fall under the former. 29 See Williams 1985, 121–22 and Finocchiaro 2005. 30 See Carnap 1935 and Quine 1960. 31 See Stroud 1996, and the contributions in De Caro and MacArthur 2004. 32 See, along similar lines, McDowell 1996, 108–28. 33 For the wider argument, see Dupré 2001. 34 See Korsgaard 1996, 41, 44, and 146. 35 See Rawls 2005, 11–22, 29–35, and 227–30; and Rawls 1971, 11–17 and 515–16. 36 See Forst 2012, 15–16. 37 See Habermas 2003, 15. 38 See Latour 2004b. 39 John Dupré has termed this “promiscuous realism.” See Dupré 1993 and 1996b. 40 See Barad 2007, 3 and 26. 41 See also Barad 2007, 33, 57, 97–131, 135, and 139. 42 What Barad describes as “phenomena” might be better understood by the term “epistemic things.” See Rheinberger 1997. 43 For Barad, however, this rejection of representationalism also implies a rejection of humanism and individualism. 44 See, for example, Barabási, Gulbahce, and Loscalzo 2011; Johnson and Linksvayer 2010; Robinson 1999. 45 See, for instance, Dretske 1988, 3–9; Davidson 1980; and Chisholm 1966. 46 See, for example, Custers and Aarts 2010. 47 See Emirbayer and Mische 1998. 48 See, for instance, Barandiaran, Di Paolo, and Rohde 2009. 49 See also Barad 2007, 171. For Barad, this leads to a broader critique of causality. See 234 and 393–94. 50 See Sellars 1997. 51 See, for instance, Rouse 2015, 114–30. Price 2011, and Noë 2012 and 2004, make similar points even though they are not interested in evolutionary niches. 52 See also Bennett 2010, 39–51. 53 See Bennett 2010, 116–17. 54 See Bennett 2010, 94. 55 Wimsatt (1994) would view such scales in terms of different compositional lev- els of organization, which is suggestive of a functional hierarchy that my own account does not share. 56 This is not the right place to expand on the contested nature of supervenience as a philosophical concept. See, however, programmatically McLaughlin 1995 and Kim 1993. 57 See, for instance, de Waal 2006. This volume also includes a response paper by Christine M. Korsgaard. 58 See, for instance, Latour 2009 and Vismann 2008. 59 See Monod and Jacob 1961. .See Görke and Stülke 2008 60 61 See Monod 1971, 98. 62 See Cowan, Moraro, Schaff, Slepchenko, and Loew 2012. 63 See Desai and Mitchison 1997, and Kirschner and Mitchison 1986. 64 See Kirschner and Gerhart 2005, 143–53. 65 See Kelley and Pyenson 2015, 301. See also Parker, Tsagkogeorga, Cotton, Liu, ,Provero, Stupka, and Rossiter 2013, and Lindgren, Sjövall, Carney, Uvdal, Gren Dyke, Schultz, Shawkey, Barnes, and Polcyn 2014. 66 I am relying here on Rheinberger (1997, 74–78), who observes this condition with regard to experimental outcomes in molecular biology. This is also a crucial element of Barad’s account of intraaction. See Barad 2007, 234–35. Normativity Matters 295 67 See Rouse 2002, 20, 227, and 331. 68 See Rouse 2002, 258–59: normatively binding patterns affect each other.

Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. 2008. Bodily Natures: Science, the Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Alaimo, Stacy. 2013. “Violet Black.” In Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 233–51. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Alaimo, Stacy. 2014. “Oceanic Origins, Plastic Activism, and New Materialism at Sea.” In Material Ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, 186–203. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Barabási, Albert-László, Natali Gulbahce, and Joseph Loscalzo. 2011. “Network Medicine: A Network-based Approach to Human Disease.” Nature Reviews Genetics 12(1): 56–68. Barad, Karen. 1996. “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism without Contradiction.” In Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science, edited by Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Jack Nelson, 161– 94. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barandiaran, Xabier E., Ezequiel Di Paolo, and Marieke Rohde. 2009. “Defining Agency: Intentionality, Normativity, Asymmetry, and Spatio-Temporality in Action.” Adaptive Behavior 17 (5): 367–86. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2015. “Ontology, Sensibility and Action.” Contemporary Political Theory 14 (1): 82–89. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, Rosi, and Patricia Pisters, eds. 2012. Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze. London: Bloomsbury. Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books. Carnap, Rudolf. 1935. Philosophy and Logical Syntax. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Carnap, Rudolf. 1938. “Logical Foundations of the Unity of Science.” In International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Volume 1, edited by Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and Charles Morris, 42–62. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Causey, Robert L. 1977. Unity of Science. Dordrecht: Reidel. Chen, Mel Y. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chisholm, Roderick. 1966. “Freedom and Action.” In Freedom and Determinism, edited by Keith Lehrer, 11–44. New York: Random House. Churchland, Paul M. 1988. Matter and Consciousness. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. 2010. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 1–43. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 296 Emden Cowan, Ann E, Ion I. Moraro, James C. Schaff, Boris M. Slepchenko, and Leslie M. Loew. 2012. “Spatial Modeling of Cell Signalling Networks.” In Methods in Cell Biology, Volume 110, Computational Methods in Cell Biology, edited by Anand R. Asthagiri and Adam P. Arkin, 195–221. Waltham, MA: Elsevier. Crowell, Steven G. 2013. Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Custers, Ruud, and Henk Aarts. 2010. “The Unconscious Will: How the Pursuit of Goals Operates Outside of Conscious Awareness.” Science 329: 47–50. Davidson, Donald. 1980. “Agency.” In Essays on Actions and Events, 43–61. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Davis, Tony. 1997. Humanism. London: Routledge. De Caro, Mario, and David MacArthur, eds. 2004. Naturalism in Question. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Desai, Arshad, and Timothy J. Mitchison. 1997. “Microtubule Polymerization Dynamics.” Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology 13: 83–117. Dretske, Fred. 1988. Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dupré, John. 1993. The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dupré, John. 1996a. “Metaphysical Disorder and Scientific Disunity.” In The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power, edited by Peter Galison and David J. Stump, 101–117. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Dupré, John. 1996b. “Promiscuous Realism: A Reply to Wilson.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (3): 441–44. Dupré, John. 2001. Human Nature and the Limits of Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Emirbayer, Mustafa, and Ann Mische. 1998. “What Is Agency?” American Journal of Sociology 103 (4): 962–1023. Finocchiaro, Maurice A. 2005. “Six Types of Fallaciousness: Towards a Realistic Theory of Logical Criticism.” In Arguments about Arguments, 128–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Forst, Rainer. 2012. The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice. Translated by Jeffrey Flynn. New York: Columbia University Press. Forst, Rainer. 2015. Normativität und Macht: Zur Analyse sozialer Rechtfertigungsordnungen. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Fraser, Nancy. 1997. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition. London: Routledge. Frost, Samantha. 2008. Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Geuss, Raymond. 2008. Philosophy and Real Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. :Görke, Boris, and Jörg Stülke. 2008. “Carbon Catabolite Repression in Bacteria Many Ways to Make the Most Out of Nutrients.” Nature Reviews Microbiology 6(8): 613–24. Habermas, Jürgen. 1990. “Discourse Ethics.” In Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, translated by Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 43–115. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Translated by William Rehg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Normativity Matters 297 Habermas, Jürgen. 2003. The Future of Human Nature. Translated by William Rehg, Max Pensky, and Hella Beister. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hacking, Ian. 1996. “The Disunities of the Sciences.” In The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power, edited by Peter Galison and David J. Stump, 37–74. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Haraway, Donna J. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, Donna J. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Haugeland, John. 1998. Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2008. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, B. R., and T. A. Linksvayer. 2010. “Deconstructing the Superorganism: Social Physiology, Groundplans, and Sociogenomics.” Quarterly Review of Biology 85(1): 57–79. Kelley, Neil P. and Nicholas D. Pyenson. 2015. “Evolutionary Innovation and Ecology in Marine Tetrapods from the Triassic to the Anthropocene.” Science 348(6232): 301. Full text doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa3716. Kim, Jaegwon. 1993. “Supervenience as a Philosophical Concept.” In Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays, 131–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kirschner, Marc W., and John C. Gerhart. 2005. The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kirschner, Marc W., and Timothy J. Mitchison. 1986. “Beyond Self-Assembly: From Microtubules to Morphogenesis.” Cell 45 (3): 329–42. Kornblith, Hilary. 2002. Knowledge and Its Place in Nature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Korsgaard, Christine M. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krause, Sharon R. 2011. “Bodies in Action: Corporeal Agency and Democratic Politics.” Political Theory 39 (3): 299–324. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2004a. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2004b. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225–48. Latour, Bruno. 2009. The Making of Law: An Ethnography of the Conseil d’Etat. Translated by Marina Brilman and Alain Pottage. Cambridge: Polity Press. Leiter, Brian. 2015. “Normativity for Naturalists” Philosophical Issues 25(1): 64–79. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Lindgren, Johan, Peter Sjövall, Ryan M. Carney, Per Uvdal, Johan A. Gren, Gareth Dyke, Bo Pagh Schultz, Matthew D. Shawkey, Kenneth R. Barnes, Michael J. Polcyn. 2014. “Skin Pigmentation Provides Evidence of Convergent Melanism in Extinct Marine Reptiles.” Nature 506 (7489): 484–88. 298 Emden Lipton, Peter. 2004. Inference to the Best Explanation. 2nd expanded ed. London: Routledge. MacCormack, Patricia. 2012. Posthumanist Ethics: Embodiment and Cultural Theory. Aldershot: Ashgate. McDowell, John. 1996. Mind and World. With a new introduction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McDowell, John. 2009. Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McLaughlin, Brian P. 1995. “Varieties of Supervenience.” In Supervenience: New Essays, edited by Elias E. Savellos and Ümit D. Yalçın, 16–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Monod, François. 1971. Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology. Translated by Austryn Wainhouse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Monod, Jacques, and François Jacob. 1961. “Teleonomic Mechanisms in Cellular Metabolism, Growth, and Differentiation.” Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology 26: 389–401. Moore, G. E. Principia Ethica. 1993. Rev. ed., with the Preface to the second ed. Edited and with an introduction by Thomas Baldwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morton, Timothy. 2010. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the Political. London: Routledge. Nayar, Pramad K. 2013. Posthumanism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2002. Beyond Good and Evil. Edited by Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman. Translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Noë, Alva. 2012. Varieties of Presence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parker, Joe, Georgia Tsagkogeorga, James A. Cotton, Yuan Liu, Paolo Provero, Elia Stupka, and Stephen J. Rossiter. 2013. “Genome-wide Signatures of Convergent Evolution in Echolocating Mammals,” Nature 502 (7470): 228–31. Pettit, Philip. 2012. On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Price, Huw. 2011. Naturalism without Mirrors. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Protevi, John. 2009. Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Putnam, Hilary. 1985. Realism and Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quine, Willard Van Orman. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Quine, Willard Van Orman. 1969. “Epistemology Naturalized.” In Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, 69–90. New York: Columbia University Press. Rawls, John. 1971. Justice as Fairness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, John. 2005. Political Liberalism. Expanded ed. New York: Columbia University Press. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 1997. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Normativity Matters 299 Robinson, Gene E. 1999. “Integrative Animal Behavior and Sociogenomics.” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 14 (5): 202–205. Rouse, Joseph. 2002. How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rouse, Joseph. 2015. Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sellars, Wilfrid. 1997. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Edited by Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, Mick. 2011. Against Ecological Sovereignty: Ethics, Biopolitics, and Saving the Natural World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stroud, Barry. 1996. “The Charm of Naturalism,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 70: 43–55. Thompson, Simon, and Paul Hoggett, eds. 2012. Politics and the Emotions: The Affective Turn in Contemporary Political Studies. New York: Continuum. Vismann, Cornelia. 2008. Files: Law and Media Technology. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Waal, Frans de. 2006. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Edited and with an introduction by Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Washick, Bonnie, and Elizabeth Wingrove. 2015. “Politics That Matter: Thinking about Power and Justice with the New Materialists.” Contemporary Political Theory 14(1): 63–79. Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wimsatt, William. 1994. “The Ontology of Complex Systems: Levels of Organization, Perspectives, and Causal Thickets.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy supplemen- tary volume 20: 207–74. Wolfe, Cary. 2003. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Wolfe, Cary. 2012a. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wolfe, Cary. 2012b. “Humane Advocacy and the Humanities: The Very Idea.” In Species Matters: Humane Advocacy and Cultural Theory, edited by Marianne DeKoven and Michael Lundblad, 27–48. New York: Columbia University Press. Concluding (Irenic) Postscript Naturalism as a Response to the New Materialism1

John H. Zammito Rice University

What we need ... is a dialectical history of science. But having said this, it should be clear that the norms of such a science must be derived from the historical context itself and cannot be imposed upon it by philosophical fiat, or by some supra-historical a priori conception of rationality ... It requires, I think, a characterization of the historical enterprise called science, in a new way, in order to see in it the sources of its intrinsic normativeness. (Wartofsky, 1979, 134)

How are we to think the protean category Nature today? One place to begin is by asking the question: “nature, as opposed to what?” The tradi- tional answer was clear: the contrast term was supernatural: God or spirit. Of course, the modern answer to the question has been not God but man. The human (culture or society), and human intervention—artifice, technol- ogy—set in aggressive opposition to nature: this is the overarching feature of modern Western civilization. The great incendiaries of the “Scientific Revolution” and all their myriad heirs have pursued the utilitarian vision that dominion over nature would secure human flourishing in this very world. (Bacon, 1620) There were both spiritual and practical features to this insurrection: it sought to affirm our freedom and our dignity, to preserve— by transforming it—the traditional principle that we were uniquely fash- ioned in the “image and likeness” of God and therefore not merely bound to the natural order, but “as it were, [its] lords and masters” (Descartes 1632). So, the modern West has pursued the juxtaposition of man to nature, privileging mind over matter, soul over body, agency against inertness. But the superlative value attached to being human seemed to be purchased by annulling value in nature itself. Carolyn Merchant famously drew the dark side of this emancipation: she called it the “death of Nature” (Merchant 1980; see Focus 2006). It appears this radical severance of man from nature has ultimately benumbed the very spirit it sought to exalt, befuddled the very reason it sought to empower, bedeviled the very dignity it sought to canonize.2 To be sure, no merely philosophical objection has impelled revi- sion, but rather the very ineptitude of our pervasive hegemony over nature. Concluding (Irenic) Postscript 301 It is, as the great ironist Nietzsche asserted more than a century ago, the relentless success of our science and technology which is wrenching us from all the moorings of our humanistic dualisms and casting us against the hard shoals of a naturalism which seems destitute of all redeeming value.3 But is naturalism inevitably a nihilism? If we all have too much reason to doubt any radical distinction between ourselves and nature, between our- selves and our artifices, is this necessarily to cast all into the Cimmerian gloom? What resources have we to think through annulment of these presumptions? As Pascal long ago observed, we find ourselves already embarked: we must seek orientation where we now find ourselves and with what resources we have to hand. That is the sense I make of Quine’s central metaphor of “Neurath’s boat.”4 It is the core of philosophical naturalism. It will never satisfy those who want a definitive foundation, nor will it seem “pure” enough for those who believe that it is only via transcendental argu- ments that we can establish a human vantage on the world. Today, the question of our place in nature is thrust upon us—made urgent with our increased awareness of the extraordinary interdepend- ence and mutability of natural systems at higher orders of complexity (e.g., climate change) and with our headlong plunge into biotechnology, smashing through traditional boundaries simply because we can. It seems clearly hubristic to remain enlisted in Descartes’ company of the “as it were, lords and masters” of creation in this ironically “posthuman” age of the “Anthropocene,” when our mastery has come to appear quite Pickwickian (Chakrabarty, 2009, 2013). From systems theory to “complexity” theory to “deep ecology,” we endeavor to reconsider our place in nature. We are struggling to come up with new categories through which to conceptualize and cope with the current dissolution of every boundary between humans, machines, and the organic world, to order our sense of the hybridity of the world, not just our categories (Latour 1993; Baldi 2001; Sheehan and Sosna, 1991; Clark 2003; Baillie and Casey, 2005). We have witnessed over the last fifty years a wholesale blurring of the biological, the human, and the technological. In 1985, Donna Haraway published her imaginative and influential “Cyborg Manifesto” to claim that “in our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism” (Haraway 1985, 150; see Thrift 2006, Gane 2006, Hayles 2006). Hence her signature metaphor of the cyborg. Blurred boundaries enabled a larger technological-geopolitical transfor- mation: “the translation of the world into a problem of coding,” which Haraway termed the “informatics of domination,” a “movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system” direct- ing “rearrangements in world-wide social relations tied to science and tech- nology” (164, 161). In this brave new world, “it is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding sys- tems.” (177) In the leading sector, “communications sciences and biology 302 Zammito are constructions of natural-technical objects of knowledge in which the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred” (165). Our acts appear to be distending our world beyond the resources of our language to conceive. Science and technology, world capitalism, and mod- ern states are acting—will continue to act—at a dizzying pace, leaving us gasping for lexical oxygen, for conceptual resources to think our new situ- ation. What human means will have undergone such utter transfiguration in the next decades through biotechnology as to set at peril not only the old-fashioned question of the relation between the “two cultures” (Snow 1959), but the whole project of philosophical comprehension of its time in thought.5 The old scheme of physical reductionism has become quizzi- cal; the paradigm of science appears to have shifted from physics to biol- ogy, even as philosophy seems finally to be relinquishing positivism (see Zammito 2004a). The fructifying analogies of the codes of DNA at the level of the cell, of cognitive codes at the level of mind or artificial intelligence, and of systemic transformation at the level of the planet and the cosmos as a whole, betoken an irreversible interfusion of the natural, the human, and the technical (Hayles 1999; Barad 2003; Pepperell 2003). This is the rich domain that Katherine Hayles has characterized as the “cognitive noncon- scious” and that Andy Clark and others have conceived as the “extended mind” (Hayles 2012, 2014, 2016, and this volume; Clark 2003). In that context, philosophy of science must reach beyond the strictly methodological; there is a place for philosophy of nature. The challenge is to comprehend these developments, anticipate them, interpret them, perhaps even, on the most hopeful construction, influence them, inform them with a more robust vision of man and nature that can salvage through reformula- tion the ethical, the social, and the ecological dignity and freedom which it has taken us so long to imagine and to seek to actualize. To come to grips with this, we must review our long-standing concern with the limits of human reason. The point of departure is that nature is at least in some measure rationally comprehensible. There cannot even be a hope for science without this posit, and that we have science is a powerful warrant for its plausibility. Conversely, nature has generated creatures capable of ration- ally comprehending it. Hegel put it succinctly long ago: the actual is rational and the rational is actual (Hegel 1967).

Materialism versus Philosophical Naturalism One of our contributors makes the suggestion that “matter” may be the wrong concept for the articulation of the physical world (Woods, this vol- ume). I want to suggest that “materialism” may be the wrong concept for grasping our placement in that world, and that naturalism has more to offer. As a matter of historical and constitutive fact, of course, physics could never restrict itself to extended matter. It always wanted to understand motion, as well. Since the “Scientific Revolution” posited that matter could Concluding (Irenic) Postscript 303 not move itself, external causation was required. Thus, from motion came the problem of force (Schofield 1970; Heimann and McGuire 1971). From force—especially the action-at-a-distance of gravity—came field, which extended swiftly into electro-magnetism, and modern physics thus became a concern with energies, not matter. “Materialism” is thus an equivocal term. If it stands synecdochally for commitment to the laws of the physical world, then a lot more is at stake. Nature, in short, has always encompassed more than “matter.” That is why naturalism seems a more commodious rubric. Hence, I believe there can be a deep solidarity between aspirations of the “new materialisms” and what I wish to propose as an irenic and complex naturalism. As our consideration of “new materialism” documents, the concept materialism suffers from entanglements and misrepresentations involving two other crucial concepts in philosophy, science and their interwoven his- tories: vitalism and mechanism. At the close of the nineteenth and the onset of the twentieth century, in the controversy over the views of Hans Driesch (and Henri Bergson), vitalism was found guilty of metaphysical excess and “discredited” by Jacques Loeb, within life science, and by the Vienna Circle, particularly Moritz Schlick, in philosophy of science.6 This entrenched posi- tivism and even scientism in the practical self-conception and the received philosophical wisdom of “modern science,” and I suggest we are still recov- ering from this positivist hangover (Zammito 2004a). Concurrently, materi- alism was sanitized and vindicated as “science-friendly” for serving as “an ideological bulldog in the fights with the enemies of science” (Wolfe 2013b, 53), exorcizing residues of ghostly “spirit” wherever they dared reappear in the modern “machine” (Ryle 1949). This agenda was then projected back (as mechanistic physicalism) upon the early modern epoch, especially in the “classical” reconstruction of the “Scientific Revolution,” to serve as the foundation of modern science (Gillispie 1960; Westfall 1971). The matter theory of the late seventeenth century may not be fully equivalent to con- temporary eliminativist physicalism, which “restricts meaningful statements to physical bodies or processes that are verifiable or in principle verifiable” (Wolfe 2016, 99) in received positivist fashion, but it was eagerly opposed to animism. At the heart of all this retrofitted sanitation was the notion of mecha- nism.7 Laplacean (blind, mechanistic, physicalist) determinism has been a significant force in Western philosophical culture, historically and in the pre- sent. In this volume, Charles Wolfe’s deflation of the notion of “mechanistic materialism” begins by confuting its bald projection onto the eighteenth- century (French) materialists by Friedrich Engels in 1888 (Engels 1982). Certainly, “this portrait of a dead materialism misses the vital character of the unique Radical Enlightenment formation,” but Wolfe goes so far as to suggest “it may be that there was no such thing” (Wolfe 2016, 72, 51). I concur entirely with the first statement, but I fear the second goes too far.8 There was a mechanistic materialism in the seventeenth century at least 304 Zammito in Hobbes and there was, despite all recent reconsideration, a mechanistic theory of matter, within a substance dualism, in Descartes.9 It provoked a reaction in the eighteenth century. Without the first, I submit, we miscon- strue the second. The eighteenth-century materialists were reacting against and in cases strongly misreading the seventeenth-century mechanists.10 The crucial category to discern in the eighteenth century is vital material- ism, the idea of emergent order as an inherent potentiality in nature itself (Reill 2005). Mid-eighteenth-century French materialism was “a concep- tion of matter as endowed with vital, self-organizing properties, a vital, non-mechanistic materialism” (Wolfe 2014a, 185). That made epigenesis the crucial concept connecting medicine, theories of generation, and vital materialism. In embryology specifically, but metaphorically more widely, epigenesis was the scientific theory expressing the fundamental intuition of hylozoism, matter alive (Zammito 2016a).11 Through epigenesis, the boldest minds of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries proposed to explain the continuity between inanimate and animate matter by rendering “force” immanent in the physical world. Through it, as well, they proposed to explain the continuity of animal and man using comparative anatomy to access comparative physiology (Bynum 1973). Finally, through it, they proposed to explain the continuity from body to mind through the analysis of nervous response and “material ideas” (Riedel 1992). Comparative anatomy and physiology aimed “to integrate the ‘life of the soul’ with medicine and thereby modify metaphysics” (Wolfe and Esveld 2014, 380). As Ernst Cassirer (1951, 88) already discerned, key eighteenth- century thinkers realized that “we must enlarge the concept of matter in such a way that it does not exclude the basic facts of consciousness.” Thus the discourse of a “material soul” proposed “not an overt denial of the soul’s existence but rather an affirmation of its corporeal existence” (Wolfe and Esveld 2014, 399). Vital materialism sought to discern, to describe, and to account for the immanent capacity (“force”) of nature to transform itself, to construct higher plateaus of order—discontinuously, emergently—and thereby to preserve the idea that, at least empirically, it was possible to con- ceive nature as coherently lawful across the divide between inanimate and animate matter. It was this constellation that led epigenesis to be scorned by its enemies as “Spinozism.” Diderot responded with a classic affirmation of this epigenetic “Spinozism” in an article for his Encyclopédie.12 He took up “an all-embracing metaphysics of living nature,” characterized as a reduc- tion to “specific and indeed ontological strata (‘causes proper to man’)” that characterize living organization—“continuity rather than mere contiguity” (Wolfe 2009, 63; Wolfe 2007, 47–48). Still, there persisted into the eight- eenth century a propensity toward the more eliminativist physicalism that the vital materialists were controverting, culminating in Laplacean deter- minism.13 The tension between these propensities was not lost on Diderot.14 His close friend, d’Holbach, was the cardinal instance, with his commitment to “reduce all causes to physical causes” (Wolfe 2016, 75). Thus “d’Holbach Concluding (Irenic) Postscript 305 was closer to … twentieth-century ideas of physicalism … But such ontological uniformity [proved] too crude for philosophers like Diderot …” (Wolfe 2014b, 108).15 If Diderot helped d’Holbach write his notori- ous System of Nature (1770), there are good grounds to believe he did not endorse all its contentions. That has bearing on Goethe’s adverse reaction to d’Holbach, and on his relation to Diderot, which I read very differently from Wolfe. A key provo- cation for me is the phrase “a world separates a Diderot from a Goethe …” (Wolfe 2016, 36). Wolfe sees Goethe as “the opposite pole to Diderot and yet connected by some affinities” (Wolfe 1999, 230). I think the affini- ties dramatically outweigh the polarities, especially for us. Wolfe misun- derstands Goethe’s reaction as a rejection of the “autopoietic character of matter” (Wolfe 2014b, 109–110). He assimilates d’Holbach’s physicalist reductionism to Diderot’s vitalism, which he had just been at pains to dis- tinguish. Worse still, he appears insensitive to Goethe’s extraordinarily pan- theist sentiments of that moment and, indeed, his epigenetic disposition in morphology throughout. I don’t think that grasps Goethe with anything like the discrimination (and sympathy) that Wolfe has shown vis à vis Diderot. As much as I find appealing Wolfe’s revision of Enlightenment, I resist his dismissal of Romanticism and his alignment with Peter Hanns Reill and oth- ers in attempting to draw an abyssal “discontinuity” between Enlightenment and Romantic philosophies of nature on the basis of an allegedly “Romantic, anti-scientific attitude” (Wolfe 2014b, 105, citing Reill 2005 explicitly). I think we need a better narrative: we can envision Diderot with Goethe— and before them Spinoza and between them Herder—in a more encompass- ing naturalism (if not “materialism”).16 For a long time after the “Scientific Revolution,” divine providence and materialist physics operated in a com- plicit partnership: physico-theology (Ellenzweig, this volume). If “inert” matter could be left to the physicists, it was precisely because everyone agreed to exempt life forms and, of course, rational human souls, from phys- ical explanation, securing these entities for theologians and philosophers to consecrate to “higher” (transcendent) purposes. Life seemed incontestably to point to divine intervention; even Kant, consistently throughout his philo- sophical career, construed its origins as inscrutably transcendent (Kant 1790; Zammito 2003, 2006, 2010). Vital materialism, starting with La Mettrie’s L’homme machine (1748), sought to make room for possibilities that the theologians and their complicit confreres in natural science were trying to foreclose. We are the heirs of these metaphysical tradeoffs of long ago. I would like to recover the philosophy of nature from Spinoza to German idealism in terms of a principle of immanent spontaneity (conatus, or, in more recent terms, emergence), and then ask how that might help lend perspective on the human situation in our times, by revitalizing our recognition of the creative majesty of nature and our utter immersion in its immanent dynam- ics. German Idealism proposed that, rather than evacuate all the dynamism, creativity, and meaning from nature for deposit in the spiritual world—first 306 Zammito of God, then of man—we should read back into nature all the spirit that two thousand years of thought had tried to dissociate from it. Rather than isolating man “above” nature, they sought to see in human spirit the ulti- mate distillation of nature’s own essence. It is the prospect that Spinoza— and even more his German idealist reception—might offer us some food for thought about the hybridity of nature and man that motivates my historicist naturalism. Frederick Beiser offers us a remarkable prospect by bringing long-despised Naturphilosophie explicitly into connection with highly con- temporary ideas in naturalized epistemology (Beiser 2002, 511). From a pre- sentist vantage, then, naturalized epistemology, with its stress on process and emergence, might well have place for ideas drawn from Naturphilosophie. Naturalism seeks in nature itself the order and the ordering capacity which enables such dramatic phenomena as life and consciousness to emerge. What I wish to pursue is whether Spinoza’s natura naturans can be of contempo- rary use. Could it signify the spontaneity of natural process in a way that makes man appear less a freak than an instance of the natural world? The German absolute idealists took up the metaphysical vision of natura naturans from Spinoza and construed a narrative of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself (Beiser 2002; Zammito 2004b). Among the many outraged protests such a speculative vision no doubt incites would be the charge of “anthropocentric triumphalism.” It certainly goes too far to suggest, as the absolute idealists clearly did, that evolution aimed precisely at us. That drastically overestimates our biological salience. Yet we need hardly presume that the purpose of the evolution of life on earth was to produce us. It suffices that it did, for this proved a significant singularity by virtue of our capacity to theorize that cosmos. The paradox binding our arbitrary emergence in time and space with our unique capac- ity to grapple conceptually with an encompassing infinity was, of course, Blaise Pascal’s profound register for human dignity (and misery), man as a “thinking reed.” To treat that condition humaine as illusion is to rob science literally of its raison d’être. Science only exists as our rational act. We can reject human exceptionalism; we should reject appeals to the supernatural in science and in ethics. But we need not reject normativity. While new materialists appear to shun the problem of normativity, espe- cially in nature, but even in politics and ethics, and even our colleague Charles Wolfe suggests that materialism entails the “destruction of norma- tivity,” in which “a normative ethics is ruled out, of course” (Wolfe 2016, 74), we need not go so far. Indeed, like Lenny Moss and Christian Emden in their positions in this volume, I think we cannot, if we are to have any hope of cogency, of intersubjectively warranted discernment of order in the world (my rather modest sense of what “science” ought to mean) (Rehg 2009; Zammito 2011b). This goes even more for normativity in politics and ethics, as Emden has persuasively contended in this volume. Here, let me address epistemic normativity. In Philip Kitcher’s terms, “the central ques- tion is whether naturalism allows any way to save the traditional meliora- tive project of epistemololgy” (Kitcher 1992, 113). Concluding (Irenic) Postscript 307 How should we conceive naturalist normativity? There is reason at the very least for exploring the idea that epistemic norms are immanent in cog- nitive development, that there can be an iterative normativity, if not an ulti- mate one.17 By carefully distinguishing between the use and the accreditation of a theory in the construction of knowledge, James Brown shows that it is possible both to utilize theory in scientific research and then to critique its result and work toward a more plausible theory (J. Brown 1980, 243; see also J. Brown 1985). This iterative normative naturalism is key to pragma- tist epistemology and philosophy of science. Admittedly, normative natural- ism remains empirical, but it does not follow that it cannot be critical. In the words of David Hull, “The stories that [investigators] tell are theory-laden but not so theory-laden as to be useless” (Hull 1992, 473). He makes the essential rebuttal: “No matter how strongly one's general views color one's estimations of data, sometimes these data can challenge the very theories in which they are generated” (471).18 The want of totality does not betoken want of concreteness. As Hilary Putnam once evoked from John Austin, enough is not everything, but enough can be enough (Putnam 1984, 239). We have no higher warrant for rationality than the success of inquiry. Rather than presuming “pure” reason transcendentally independent of, and criterial for, science as process, we must consider rationality immanent in the growth of knowledge, as emergent in and through the process of science. We should be concerned with the dynamics of developing rationality, with the historicity of reason. We need to conceive reason as an emergent—his- torically as well as individually (“phylogenetically” as well as “ontogeneti- cally”) —and seek to ascertain its structure from within the circle of its own growth in and through the process of science.19 Taking up a phrase from Charles Peirce, science is essentially the story of how we learned to learn (Nickles 1980, 7). We have compelling historical evidence that “scientific goals, methods, criticism of appraisals, etc., and not just empirical and theo- retical content, have been learned” (Nickles 1980, 45; see Shapere 1984). In the words of Shapere, “we learn what ‘knowledge’ is as we attain knowl- edge, ... we learn how to learn in the process of learning” (Shapere 1984, 185). In the words of Larry Briskman, “we want an epistemology which allows that we can learn to be more rational—that we can learn to pursue better (or more rational) aims and can equally learn to pursue these aims better (more rationally)” (Briskman 1977, 521).20 What “satisfices” may sometimes be the best we can hope for.21 Not every circularity is necessar- ily vicious, particularly not the hermeneutic circle in interpretation.22 Two strengths of the naturalist circle are its embrace of success in science, how- ever approximate we may have to be about both science and success, and the more general principle of growth of knowledge, of learning itself as the most discernible basis for any idea of rationality we might hope to find. This implies a “multi-pass conception of science,” i.e., an iterative pro- cess of adjustment, for which the term dialectical is not inappropriate (Axtell 1990, 47; Wartofsky 1979, 134). “Human knowledge has grown by means of a self-transforming, dialectical or ‘bootstrap’ process, rooted in variation, 308 Zammito selective retention, and triangulation of historically available resources” (Nickles 1992, 117). As Thomas Nickles puts it, “a defensible historicism does not rule out a bootstrap account of the development of knowledge; on the contrary, it requires it!” (Nickles 1992, 116). That is, “a moder- ate historicism itself implies that any adequate account of the growth of knowledge will be broadly circular. The growth of knowledge will have the character of a self-transforming, ultimately self-supporting or ‘bootstrap’ process” (Nickles 1992, 117). “Bootstrap” rationality is “autopoeisis,” sys- temic self-organization (Maturana and Varela 1980, 1987). That is simply what it means that “philosophers take scientific activity as somehow para- digmatic of rational behavior” (Nickles 1980, 32). This is the construction of actual scientific practise that has emerged from the best work in science studies of the past half century (Pickering, 1992; Callebaut 1993; Galison and Stump, 1996; Rouse 1996, 2002; Zammito 2004a). A problem is inconceivable without a context. It is always already mediated. If there is no ultimate foundation, there is always some platform. And that platform is far more elaborate than a bunch of mere data. “Problem contexts include much more than empirical datum constraints on adequate problem solutions. Large, conceptual problem contexts contain constraints of many kinds, many of them previous theoretical results, which function as consistency conditions, limit conditions, derivational require- ments, etc.” (Nickles 1980, 35). We can conceive of scientific problems as emergent from “a structure of constraints (on the problem solution) plus a general demand, goal, or explanatory ideal of the research program in ques- tion that certain types of gaps in those structures be filled” (Nickles 1980, 37). This whole constellation is what Andy Pickering has termed “the man- gle of practice” (Pickering 1995). These constraints “constitute a rich supply of premises and context-specific rules for reasoning toward a problem solu- tion” (Nickles 1980, 37). Thus every problem is an emergent, in a situation, and the constraints that situate the emergent problem also equip the inquiry with (some of) the terms for its solution. Moreover, this whole syndrome must be taken as a dynamic, not a static process, resulting in “successively sharper reformulations of a problem” (Nickles 1980, 38). Such reformula- tions can result in radical departures, and it has been empirically the case that “it frequently takes science a good deal of time and effort after a discov- ery to say what exactly has been discovered” (Nickles 1980, 22; Rheinberger 1997, 2010). The path of development—natural and human, physical and conscious—becomes constitutive for the world as we know it: naturalism entails historicism (and conversely).23 That is the core of complex naturalism. Two points emerge. First, retrospectively we can trace the routes of (some of) our insights. Second, making intelligible those successes can empower us, both psychologically and methodologically, to undertake new inquiries. Not only can we be confident that “scientific problems and constraints do not fall out of the sky,” but we can be hopeful that we can reiterate at least some of the moves that led us through prior solutions and learn how to attempt Concluding (Irenic) Postscript 309 new ones (Nickles 1980, 38). This is what Thomas Kuhn meant by the role of paradigm performances in the constitution of scientific research pro- grams (Kuhn 1970). Nickles affirms a Deweyan Hegelianism here: embrac- ing “Hegel’s ‘methodological’ insights, his anti-dualism, and his historicist and sociological tendencies” (Nickles 1989, 248). This pragmatist-natu- ralist reception is, he aptly affirms, only “weakly Hegelian because ... it presupposes no transcendent Reason that shapes the overall developmen- tal process” (Nickles 1992, 117). With Nickles, I believe the project now is to “temper our historicism with a dose of (pragmatic) naturalism,” and achieve thereby a “more Deweyan sort of balance” (Nickles 1992, 89, 116). That, in my view, is the “living” heritage of Hegelian dialectics. A prag- matist naturalized epistemology, on the grounds of epistemological humil- ity—contingency, fallibility—and of ontological parsimony—one world, not Popper’s three (Popper 1959)—recognizes that our arsenal of rational- logical and moral posits has grown and changed over time. Nothing in that arsenal need be “timeless,” yet we have strong reason to trust in it as the best resource currently available. The reason for trust is simply success in use, not transcendent illumination. The key to complex naturalism is its placement not only of the object but of the subject of knowledge as well within natural processes (Shimony and Nails, 1987; Callebaut and Pinxten, 1987; Rescher, 1990). This imputes both a creative spontaneity to nature and a contingent (evolutionary and historical) emergence to human capacities which overturn longstanding pieties in epistemology (Rouse 2015). Certainly a contemporary natural- ist metaphysics cannot resort to foundationalism—either the traditional faith in a priori logical form or the confidence in some primordial “given” of positivist empiricism. Instead, we have to reckon with finitude and fal- libility without surrendering reasonable hope for empirical knowledge. It will be contingent but not arbitrary: nature resists, and that resistance con- strains our hypothesizing.24 But that negative element is complemented by a positive one: nature develops, achieving higher orders of emergence in an ongoing process.25 The shift of focus from science as product to science as process, from the context of justification to the context of discovery, from logic to rationality, from timelessness to historicity—all these betoken the robustness of a naturalist, historicist, evolutionary epistemology.

“Enchanted” Materialism, “Visceral Materialism,” and Natura Naturans One of the essentially contested issues surrounding the new materialism is how to conceive the relation of “spirit” to the natural. Should the project be to divest even the human of the last vestiges of “spirit,” thus completing the “disenchantment of the world,” or should the project be to read “spirit,” traditionally taken to be exclusively human, as more widely and essentially distributed in nature itself? Is materialism’s project to “reduce” the human, 310 Zammito to mock the pretenses of exceptionalism, or is it to relocate the human back into a far richer, more agential nature? Two stances have emerged: “re- enchantment of the world” as “vibrant matter,” celebrated by Jane Bennett and others; and “visceral” materialism, heaping scorn upon any residue of the “ghost in the machine.” I will opt for a position that straddles what I take to be useful in each of these postures. In the Introduction to this volume, we have considered the controversy over whether the proper response to the current cultural crisis is, as some new materialists contend, a “re-enchantment” of the world, or whether we have simply not had enough, or the right kind of, “disenchantment.” That debate could have been clearer in explicating exactly what enchantment and spirit mean, and whether such notions really require putting “ghosts” back into the “machine” of the world. Indeed, one can legitimately wonder who is more guilty of indulging in metaphorical or metaphysical excesses here; for “ghost” and “machine” are not exactly neutral terms! In any event, I believe disenchantment has been a real and potent cultural force in the modern West. One indicator I would invoke is that even in the hardest of sciences we get whimsical admissions of loss, as when subatomic properties are labeled “charm” or “love.” I don’t think irony suffices to explain this. Ruefulness comes closer. Moreover, what the new physics has shown us is a pulsating field of energies, rather remote from the monotonic “machine” that eliminative materialism has been so anxious to confirm. Thus, I think we need to take questions of “re-enchantment” a bit more graciously into consideration. On the other hand, we must not neglect the polemical bite of the more “visceral” materialism, either. In his brisk new study, Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction (2016), Charles Wolfe embraces a materialism that is “‘vis- ceral,’ figuratively and literally”; “the reductionism here is corporeal, or even carnal ... whether from soul to body, from free-will to organic deter- minism, or from values and norms to medico-materialist concepts” (Wolfe 2016, 49, 75). I will take him up on his aggressive articulation of this “vis- ceral” materialism, both to critique what I find all-too-adamant and to dis- cern possible convergences in his own view that seem to me more plausible both vis à vis the new materialism and my own more irenic naturalism. Wolfe evinces an enormous truculence toward interiority, subjectivity, and the “first person.” As he puts it, “I’d like to put some more nails in the cof- fin of the (admittedly ‘undead’) first-person perspective.” He is concerned to articulate “a materialist response to this first-person challenge,” to root out the “dogmatic anti-naturalism found in most corners of phenomenol- ogy.” Wolfe anathemizes “an out-of-control insistence on subjectivity, first personness, and opposition between flesh and body which goes as far as the sacralization of the living organism” (Wolfe 2016, 11, 109–110, 55). Wolfe’s approach is resolutely third person. “Shouldn’t intelligent mate- rialists—to borrow an expression from Deleuze ...—take up the challenge of conceptualising material souls?” (Wolfe and Esveld 2014, 416). The proper materialist mission, in the words Wolfe borrows from William Lycan (1990), Concluding (Irenic) Postscript 311 is “‘to give some account of the subjectivity or perspectivalness or point-of- view-ness of the mental.’” It is a matter not of “denying the existence of introspection,” but of trying to “locate it in the physical world” (Wolfe 2016, 116). He is confident “developments in experimental neuroscience seem to substantiate the position that one can concretely identify a lived (experienced, felt) mental event, as something qualitative, with a (physical) cerebral event, accessible to scientific manipulation.” As with the contempo- rary “new materialist” theorists Jess Keiser considers in his contribution to this volume, and even the eighteenth-century thinkers Keiser believes antici- pated them, Wolfe contends, “brains are culturally sedimented; permeated in their material architecture by our culture, history and social organiza- tion, and this sedimentation is itself reflected in cortical architecture” (Wolfe 2016, 119). “The honour of the materialist is that she ... will always be deflationary, which is the analytic philosopher’s word for destructive” (Wolfe 2012b, 49). Materialism is deflationary; but must it beeliminativist (see Beckermann, et al. 1992)? I think not. Of course, we can pretend, with eliminative mate- rialists, that the “space” from which we consider not only our “conscious- ness” but their hypotheses, is merely a first-person illusion. With Ryle, we can prate about a “ghost in the machine,” or, with the Churchlands and their ilk, we can disparage the “folk psychology” that takes “consciousness” for anything more than an epiphenomenon of neuronal discharges. Still, it is not clear how we get to a third-person position on which we may collec- tively rely, deluded as each of us must be, on this account, about what we are doing when we think at all. Wolfe himself recognizes a difference between reductionism and elimi- nativism, and repeatedly invokes notions of “more levels,” of “weak emer- gence,” of “embodied materialism” or of a “pluralist” or “relational” or “constitutive ontology” (e.g., Wolfe 2016, esp. 52–53). The thrust of a num- ber of contributors to this volume—Hayles, Woods, Moss, and Emden— has been to insist on variance across the scalar orders of the world. Wolfe acknowledges, “it seems dogmatic to reject the existence of a weaker sense of an inherent teleology in organisms, including their functional integration” (Wolfe 2012a, 118). He admits that “we need a more unified—more ‘imma- nent’—picture of vital activity” (Wolfe 2016, 34).26 Indeed, “physics neither was, nor should be, the necessary reducing theory and the ontological base or basis for materialism” (Wolfe 2016, 128). The episode of DNA proves instructive in this regard. Wolfe writes that “faith in the power of reductive explanation was significantly reinforced by Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA in the early 1950s.” As a result, “molecular biology tends to be accepted as ‘ontologically real’; anything higher-level is often explained as instrumental: as the product of human concerns.” But “the initial enthu- siasm of the reductionists has been tempered considerably, and by now, philosophers of biology have, for the most part, agreed that a reduction of biology to physics and chemistry is implausible ... [the biological] will not disappear, nor be ‘reduced’ out of existence” (Wolfe 2016, 92). 312 Zammito To be sure, no naturalist or materialist can accept the notion of “some pure ego contemplating the reality of the flesh like a sailor in a ship” (Wolfe 2015b, 205). But that is not the only approach to subjectivity or to any empirically warranted sense of human distinctiveness available to natural- ists. The self may be a “narrativizing fiction,” but in the measure that it represents a “tipping point” for the impetus of internal and external drives through which they become recognized and expressible in thought and action, it is real, and not to be scoffed away. The naturalism I invoke is disposed not so much to guffaw at human frailty as to help humans feel at home again in the world. Its project is not to eliminate spirit but to natural- ize it. (See Gaukoger 2016; Kauffmann 1995; Bateson 1979.) Such naturalism aims not to spurn the human (as in “posthumanism” or eliminativist physicalism) but to draw it back prudently into the web of the world. “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” does indeed drive our own lives. Of course that is not necessarily benign. Diderot’s materialist mathematician, Saunderson, from A Letter on Blindness (1751), offered a sense of measure: “We are in nature. Sometimes we feel right there [good, happy, comfortable], sometimes not ... Nature is good and beauti- ful when it favours us. It is ugly and evil when it afflicts us” (cited in Wolfe 2009, 73). To be sure, we need to hearken to Nietzsche’s cautions: one can fall into a “pathetic fallacy” with immanence no less than with transcend- ence (Nietzsche 2001). Yet there remains measure, not only in our conduct but in our constructions in the first as well as the third person, and we would do well not to forego it. Hyperbolic negation—whether posthuman or elimi- nativist—is no remedy for alleged “spiritualist” hypostasis. One might bet- ter be cautious than caustic. As humans, we need a scope for affirmation, as Nietzsche would be the last to deny. I suggest naturalism can enable us to “sing the body electric.” Donna Haraway invited us to be happy hybrids. We are one of nature’s most remarkable emergents: a natural form which generates in staccato profusion still more forms which ultimately cannot but be every whit as natural since they are ours. We are now far better situated to conceive a nature whose immanent capacities for self-organization and self-transformation offer us a place within, capacious enough to accommo- date what’s left of our dignity even as it implicitly urges a parallel and recip- rocal affirmation and accommodation of its own. The dread that we will lose human dignity in the brave new world upon which we have embarked must be met by the reply that we are only renewing our affiliation with a grander dignity—natura naturans.

Notes 1 This essay draws on a number of my earlier publications, including Zammito et al. 2008; Zammito 2004b; Zammito 2011a; and Zammito 2013. 2 Borrowing a phrase from the poet Friedrich Schiller, Max Weber famously characterized this as a “disenchantment of the world” (Weber 1948, 155). See Schroeder 1995; Jenkins 2000. Concluding (Irenic) Postscript 313 3 Nietzsche’s conception of modern nihilism entailed “the doctrine of sovereign becoming, of the fluidity of all concepts, types and species, of the lack of any cardinal distinctions between man and animal—doctrines which I consider true but deadly ...” (Nietzsche 2003, 112–113.) 4 The phrase “adrift on Neurath’s boat” features in “Five Milestones of Empiricism,” in Quine 1981, 72, and appears as an epigram in Quine 1960, vii. This metaphor is central to Quine’s articulation of naturalized epistemology. See Quine 1969. 5 If C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” (1959) represent a preoccupation specific to late modernism, Hegel’s project for philosophy, that concern for meaning in our human situatedness in the world, still expresses a desideratum without which we become inconsolably lost (Hegel 1967). 6 Charles Wolfe sums it up: for positivists “vitalism is a paradigm case of ‘bad science’ ...” (Wolfe 2011a, 230). See Driesch 1914; Bergson 1959; Loeb 1964; Schlick 1953; and for a historical discussion, see Burwick and Douglass, eds., 1992; Allen 2005; Malaterre 2013. On earlier versions of “vitalism,” see Cimino and Duchesneau, eds., 1997; Duchesneau 1997; Rey 2000; Wolfe and Terada 2008; Hunemann 2011; Nouvel, ed., 2011; Normandin and Wolfe, eds., 2013; Normandin and Wolfe 2013. 7 “Mechanism” is no unequivocal concept, and its historical mutations and cur- rent contentiousness suggest that we should be very wary of using this term (posi- tively or negatively) without substantial circumspection. See for example Gabbey 2002; Garber & Roux, eds., 2013; Bechtel 2013. 8 “It is not that there was no such thing as mechanistic materialism,” Wolfe con- cedes, alluding to Hobbes, Hartley, and d’Holbach (Wolfe 2014b, 105). But he allows himself the rhetorical excess of problematizing this. 9 Wolfe seems to accept the revisionist reading of Descartes as having dispelled any mechanistic materialism in his theory of substance dualism regarding the mind and the body. That goes too far. I am also not convinced that we must read seventeenth-century physics from Descartes through Newton as already a vitalist view, notwithstanding Ellenzweig’s efforts in this volume. 10 Thus, Wolfe acknowledges that writers like Toland and Collins early in the cen- tury, alongside the anonymous author of L’Âme Matérielle and La Mettrie a bit later, propounded “criticism of the Cartesian/Malebranchian notion of inert mat- ter and theory of mechanism that went with it ...” (Wolfe 2014b, 99). He cites the crucial article “Chymie” by Venel in the Encyclopédie as exposing “the errors of iatromechanists with respect to the functioning of the ‘animal economy’” (Wolfe 2011c, 191). See Pépin 2011. 11 “One can only grasp in what an enormous configuration of history of science and philosophy this epigenesis model is situated, when one has reconstructed the main arguments of the fiercely conducted debate over the phenomenon of genera- tion after the middle of the eighteenth century. What emerges is that answers to this question of how one should think about the biological origin of humans are not just some scientific paradigms among many but without question compre- hend, in their speculative disclosure of abysses [Abgründlichkeit], the discourses of theoretical and even practical philosophy” (Müller-Sievers 1993, 29). 12 “One should not confuse the old spinozists with the modern spinozists. The gen- eral principle of the latter is that matter is sensible, which they demonstrate by the development of the egg, an inert body which, by the sole instrumentality of gradual warming, passes into the state of being sensitive and alive, and by the growth of every animal which at the outset is nothing but a point and which, by the nutritive assimilation of plants—in a word, of all substances which pro- vide nutrition, emerges as a large, sensitive, and living body occupying a large space. From this they conclude that there is nothing but matter and that it suf- 314 Zammito fices to explain everything. For the rest, they follow the older spinozism in all its consequences” (1765; Diderot 1998, 328–29). 13 “Neither [Anthony] Collins nor Diderot are Laplacian determinists, unlike d’Holbach or in a more restricted sense, Hobbes” (Wolfe 2007, 38). 14 “Diderot’s critique of Helvétius’ de L’Homme (1773) … focuses precisely on the latter’s excessively ‘mechanistic’ picture of behaviour …” (Wolfe 2015a, 83). 15 Wolfe writes elsewhere of “d’Holbach’s insistence on an unbroken chain of causes, ultimately physical causes,” then goes on to add: “This physicalist reduc- tionism is, in fact, exactly what Diderot will criticize …” (Wolfe 2009, 59). 16 See my rejoinder to Reill (Zammito 2016b); my contrasting reconstruction of Romantic Naturphilosophie in line with Frederick Beiser and Robert Richards (Zammito 2004b); and my full-scale alternative account, Zammito, forthcoming. 17 For an effort to develop this iterativity as “reticular” normative naturalism, see Laudan 1987a, 1987b, 1990. For critical responses, see Grobler 1990; Rosenberg 1990; Leplin 1990; Siegel 1990; and Doppelt 1990. On epistemic norms, see Longino 1996. 18 He puts it pithily in another context: “reality has a way of forcing itself on us independent of our beliefs” (Hull 1979, 12). Harold Brown makes the same point: “it is not the case that there are no checks on the range of possible inter- pretations … the range of possible ways of understanding it is limited by the properties of that object” (H. Brown 1977, 552). 19 As Harold Brown argues, “A consistent empiricism requires that even truths of logic have [a] kind of empirical prehistory …” (H. Brown 1988, 61). That is, “norms, in the form of both ends for science and methodological imperatives, are introduced and evaluated in the same ways as theoretical hypotheses, experimen- tal designs, new mathematics, and other features of the so-called content of sci- ence” (69). For concrete pursuits of this developmental emergentism in scientific practices, see Rheinberger 1997 or Pickering 1995. 20 “What is given up is an unworkable supra-historical a priori conception of ratio- nality …” (Kegley 1989, 253) 21 Quine got to the heart of what giving up positivist foundationalism means: “scru- ples against circularity have little point once we have stopped dreaming of deduc- ing science from observations” (Quine 1969, 75–76). 22 The idea of the hermeneutic circle has been that, via a process of successive approximations against wider and wider resources of application, interpretation achieves an immanent and self-correcting rigor. See different articulations of this matter: Palmer 1969; Hoy 1978; Ricoeur 1981. 23 On the path dependency, hence historicity, of human knowledge, see Rheinberger 1997 and 2010; and see my review essay, Zammito 2011a. 24 See the discussion of resistance and constraint between Pickering (1995) and Galison (1995). 25 See Wimsatt’s discussion of “generative entrenchment” (Wimsatt 2007); and see Moss on levels of “detachment,” in this volume. 26 He insists, I believe persuasively, “it remains the case that neither the history of science nor the history of philosophy have been able to account for this particu- larly ‘embodied’ context of empiricism” (Wolfe 2010c, 341–42). I have tried to find a measured response to a much more flagrant and widely registered version of what Wolfe finds distasteful: Zammito 2013.

Works Cited Allen, Garland. 2005. “Mechanism, vitalism and organicism in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century biology: The importance of historical context.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36: 261–82. Concluding (Irenic) Postscript 315 Axtell, Guy. 1990. “Logicism, Pragmatism and Metascience: Towards a Pancritical Pragmatic Theory of Meta-level Discourse.” PSA 1990, Volume 1, 39–49. Bacon, Francis. (1620) 2000. New Organon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baillie, Harold and Timothy Casey, eds. 2005. Is Human Nature Obsolete? Genetics, Bioengineering, and the Future of the Human Condition. Cambridge: MIT Press. Baldi, Pierre. 2001. The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution. Cambridge: MIT Press. Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs 28:3, 801–31. Bateson, Gregory. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Bantam. Bechtel, William. 2013. “Addressing the Vitalist’s Challenge to Mechanical Science: Dynamic Mechanistic Explanation.” In Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post- Enlightenment Life Science, 1800–2010, edited by S. Normandin and C. Wolfe, Dordrecht: Springer. Beckermann, A., H. Flohr, and J. Kim, eds. 1992. Emergence or Reduction? Essays on the Prospects of Nonreductive Physicalism. Berlin: de Gruyter. Beiser, Frederick. 2002. German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781– 1801. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Bergson, Henri. 1959. L’évolution créatrice (1907). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Briskman, Larry. 1977. “Historicist Relativism and Bootstrap Rationality.” Monist 60, 509–39. Brown, Harold. 1977. “For a Modest Historicism.” Monist 60, 540–55. Brown, Harold. 1988. “Normative and Naturalized Epistemology.” Inquiry 31, 53–78. Brown, James. 1980. “History and the Norms of Science.” PSA 1980, volume 1, 236–48. Brown, James. 1985. “Explaining the Success of Science.” Ratio 27: 49–66. Burwick, Frederick and Paul Douglas, eds. 1992. The Crisis of Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bynum, William F. 1973. “The Anatomical Method, Natural Theology, and the Functions of the Brain.” Isis 64, 445–68. Callebaut, Werner. 1993. Taking the Naturalist Turn, or How Real Philosophy of Science Is Done. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Callebaut, Werner and Rix Pinxten, eds. 1987. Evolutionary Epistemology: A Multiparadigm Program. Dordrecht: Reidel. Cassirer, Ernst. 1951. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35:2, 197–222. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2013. “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change.” New Literary History 43:1, 1–18. Cimino, Guido and François Duchesneau, eds. 1997. Vitalism from Haller to Cell Theory. Florence: Olschki. Clark, Andy. 2003. Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford and NY: Oxford University Press. Descartes, René. (1632) 1980. Discourse on Method. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Diderot, Denis. (1751) 1770. A letter on blindness. For the use of those who have their sight. London: Printed for William Bingley, at the Britannia, No. 31, in Newgate-Street. 316 Zammito Diderot, Denis 1998. “Spinosiste.” In Encyclopédie. Reprinted in Diderot, Denis, Oeuvres philosophiques, John Lough and Jacques Proust, eds., Paris: Classiques Garnier, Volume 8. Doppelt, Gerald. 1990. “The Naturalist Conception of Methodological Standards in Science: A Critique.” Philosophy of Science 57, 1–19. Driesch, Hans. 1914. The History and Theory of Vitalism. London: Macmillan. Duchesneau, François. 1997. “Territoires et frontières du vitalism (1750–1850),” in G. Cimino and F. Duchesneau, eds., Vitalism from Haller to Cell Theory. Florence: Olschki. Engels, Friedrich. 1982. “Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie.” In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, Volume 21. Berlin: Dietz. Focus 2006: “Getting Back to The Death of Nature: Rereading Carolyn Merchant,” Isis 97:3, 485–533. Gabbey, Alan. 2002. “Newton, Active Powers, and the Mechanical Philosophy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Newton, edited by I. Bernard Cohen and George E. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Galison, Peter. 1995. “Context and Constraint.” In Scientific Practice: Theories and Stories of Doing Physics, edited by Jed Buchwald. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 13–41. Galison, Peter and David Stump, eds. 1996. The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gane, Nicholas. 2006. “When We Have Never Been Human, What Is to be Done?: Interview with Donna Haraway.” In Special Issue, Theory, Culture & Society 23:7–8, 135–58. Garber, Daniel and Sophie Roux, eds. 2013. Introduction to The Mechanization of Natural Philosophy (New York: Springer), xi–xviii. Gaukroger, Stephen. 2016. The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1739–1841. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gillispie, Charles. 1960. The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Grobler, Adam. 1990. “Between Rationalism and Relativism: On Larry Laudan’s Model of Scientific Rationality.”British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 41, 493–507. Haraway, Donna. 1985. “Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist- Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Reprinted in Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991, 149–81, notes 243–48. Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2006. “Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere.” In Special Issue, Theory, Culture & Society 23:7–8, 159–66. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2012. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2014. “Cognition Everywhere: The Rise of the Cognitive Nonconscious and the Costs of Consciousness.” New Literary History 45.2:199–220. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2016. “The Cognitive Nonconscious Part I: Enlarging the Mind of the Humanities.” Critical Inquiry 42.4 (Summer): 783–808. Concluding (Irenic) Postscript 317 Hegel, G.W.F. 1967. Philosophy of Right. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Heimann, P. M. and J. E. McGuire. 1971. “Newtonian Forces and Lockean Powers: Concepts of Matter in Eighteenth-Century Thought.” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3, 233–306. Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d’. (1770) 1808. System of Nature. Philadelphia. Hoy, David. 1978. The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hull, David. 1979. “In Defense of Presentism.” History and Theory 18, 1–15. Hull, David. 1992. “Testing Philosophical Claims about Science.” PSA 1992. Volume 2, 468–75. Huneman, Philippe. 2011. “Vie, vitalisme et émergence: Une perspective con- temporaine.” In Repenser le vitalisme, edited by Pascal Nouvel. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, Jenkins, Richard. 2000. “Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-Enchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium.” Max Weber Studies 1, 11–32. Kant, Immanuel. (1790) 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kauffman, Stuart. 1995. At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self- Organization and Complexity. New York: Oxford University Press. Kegley, J. 1989. “History and Philosophy of Science: Necessary Partners or Merely Roommates?” In History and Anti-History in Philosophy, edited by T.Z. Lavine and V. Tejera. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Kitcher, Philip. 1992. “The Naturalists Return.” Philosophical Review 101, 53–114. Kuhn, Thomas. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. (1748) 1996. Machine Man and Other Writings. Cambridge and New York: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laudan, Larry. 1987a. “Progress or Rationality? The Prospects for Normative Naturalism.” American Philosophical Quarterly 24, 19–31. Laudan, Larry. 1987b. “Relativism, Naturalism and Reticulation.” Synthese 71, 221–34. Laudan, Larry. 1990. “Normative Naturalism.” Philosophy of Science 57, 44–59. Leplin, Jarrett. 1990. “Renormalizing Epistemology.” Philosophy of Science 57, 20–33. Loeb, Jacques. 1964. “The mechanistic conception of life” (1912). In The Mechanistic Conception of Life, edited by D. Fleming. 5–34. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Longino, Helen. 1996. “Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Values in Science: Rethinking the Dichotomy.” In Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science, edited by Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Jack Nelson. Dordrecht: Reidel. Lycan, William. 1990. “What is the ‘Subjectivity’ of the Mental?” In Action Theory and the Philosophy of Mind, edited by James Tomberlin. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview. Malaterre, Christophe. 2013. “Life as an Emergent Phenomenon: From an Alternative to Vitalism to an Alternative to Reductionism.” In S. Normandin and C. Wolfe, eds., Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800–2010. Dordrecht: Springer. 318 Zammito Maturana, Humberto and Francisco Varela. 1980. Autopoeisis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume 42. Dordrecht: Reidel. Maturana, Humberto and Francisco Varela. 1987. The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston and London: Shambala. Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Müller-Sievers, Helmut. 1993. Epigenesis: Naturphilosophie im Sprachdenken .Wilhelm von Humboldts. Paderborn: Schöning Nickles, Thomas. 1980. “Scientific Discovery and the Future of Philosophy of Science.” In Scientific Discovery, Logic, and Rationality, edited by Nickles. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume 56. Dordrecht: Reidel. Nickles, Thomas. 1989. “Integrating the Science Studies Disciplines.” In Steven Fuller, ed., The Cognitive Turn. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Nickles, Thomas. 1992. “Good Science as Bad History.” In Ernan McMullin, ed., The Social Dimensions of Science. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2001. The Gay Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2003. Untimely Meditations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Normandin, Sebastian and Charles Wolfe, eds. 2013. Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800–2010. Dordrecht: Springer. Normandin, Sebastian and Charles Wolfe. 2013. “Vitalism and the Scientific Image: An Introduction.” In Normandin and Wolfe, eds., Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800–2010. Dordrecht: Springer. Nouvel, Pascal, ed. 2011. Repenser le vitalisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Palmer, Richard. 1969. Hermeneutics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Pépin, François. 2011. “Vitalisme, chimie et philosophie autour de l’Encyclopédie et de Diderot.” In Repenser le vitalisme, edited by Pascal Nouvel. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Pepperell, Robert. 2003. The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness beyond the Brain. Bristol, UK and Portland, OR: Intellect Books. Pickering, Andrew. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Pickering, Andrew, ed. 1992. Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Popper, Karl. 1959. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Basic. Putnam, Hilary. 1984. “The Craving for Objectivity.” New Literary History 15, 229–39. Quine, Willard van Orman. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Quine, Willard van Orman. 1969. “Epistemology Naturalized.” In Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press, 69–90. Quine, Willard van Orman. 1981. “Five Milestones of Empiricism.” In Quine, Theories and Things. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rehg, William. 2009. Cogent Science in Context: The Science Wars, Argumentation Theory, and Habermas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Reill, Peter Hanns. 2005. Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Concluding (Irenic) Postscript 319 Rescher, Nicholas, ed. 1990. Evolution, Cognition, and Realism: Studies in Evolutionary Epistemology. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Rey, Roselyne. 2000. Naissance et développement du vitalisme en France de la deux- ième moitié du dix-huitième siècle à la fin du premier empire. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. ,Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 1997. Toward a History of Epistemic Things. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. :Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 2010. On Historicizing Epistemology. Stanford, CA Stanford University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1981. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Riedel, Wolfgang. 1992. “Influxus physicus und Seelenstärke: Empirische Psychologie und moralische Erzählung in der deutschen Spätaufklärung und bei Jacob Friedrich Abel.” In Anthropologie und Literatur um 1800, edited by Jürgen Barkhoff and Eda Sagarra. Munich: Iudicium. Rosenberg, Alexander. 1990. “Normative Naturalism and the Role of Philosophy.” Philosophy of Science 57, 34–43. Rouse, Joseph. 1996. Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices Philosophically. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rouse, Joseph. 2002. How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rouse, Joseph. 2015. Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ryle, Gilbert. 1949. The Concept of Mind. New York: Barnes & Noble. Schlick, Moritz. 1953. “Philosophy of Organic Life.” In Readings in the Philosophy of Science, edited by H. Feigl and M. Brodbeck. New York: Appleton-Century Crofts. Schofield, Robert. 1970. Mechanism and Materialism: British Natural Philosophy in an Age of Reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schroeder, Ralph. 1995. “Disenchantment and Its Discontents: Weberian Perspectives on Science and Technology,” Sociological Review 43, 227–50. Shapere, Dudley. 1984. Reason and the Search for Knowledge. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume 78. Dordrecht: Reidel. Sheehan, James and Morton Sosna, eds. 1991. The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Shimony, Abner and Debra Nails, eds. 1987. Naturalistic Epistemology: A Symposium of Two Decades. Dordrecht: Reidel. Siegel, Harvey. 1990. “Laudan’s Normative Naturalism.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 21, 295–313. Snow, C. P. 1959. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thrift, Nigel. 2006. “Donna Haraway’s Dreams.” In Special Issue, Theory, Culture & Society 23:7–8, 189–95. Wartofsky, Marx. 1979. “The Relation between Philosophy and History of Science.” In Models: Representation and the Scientific Understanding, edited by Marx Wartofsky and Robert Cohen. Dordrecht: Reidel. Weber, Max. 1948. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 320 Zammito Westfall, Richard. 1971. The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanisms and Mechanics. New York: Wiley. Wimsatt, Willilam. 2007. Re-engineering philosophy for limited beings: piecewise approximations to reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolfe, Charles T. 1999. “Machine et organisme chez Diderot.” Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie, 26, 213–31. Wolfe, Charles T. 2007. “Determinism/spinozism in the radical Enlightenment: the cases of Anthony Collins and Denis Diderot.” International Review of Eighteenth- Century Studies (Helsinki and Oxford: Finnish Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies), 37–51. Wolfe, Charles T. 2009. “‘Cabinet d’Histoire Naturelle,’ or: The Interplay of Nature and Artifice in Diderot’s Naturalism.” Perspectives on Science 17:1, 58–77. Wolfe, Charles T. 2010a. “Conditions de la naturalisation de l’esprit: La réponse clandestine.” La Lettre clandestine 48, 53–88. Wolfe, Charles T. 2010b. “Do Organisms Have an Ontological Status?” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 32:2–3, 195–231. Wolfe, Charles T. 2011a. “Éléments pour une théorie matérialiste du soi.” In La cir- culation entre les savoirs au siècle des Lumières. Hommage à Francine Markovitz, edited by François Pépin. Paris: Hermann, 123–49. Wolfe, Charles T. 2011c. “Why was there no controversy over Life in the Scientific Revolution?” In Controversies within the Scientific Revolution, edited by Marcelo Dascal and Victor Boantza. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 187–219. Wolfe, Charles T. 2012a. “Chance between Holism and Reductionism: Tensions in the Conceptualization of Life.” Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 110, 113–20. Wolfe, Charles T. 2012b. “Vitalism and the Resistance to Experimentation on Life in the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of the History of Biology (doi:10.1007/ s10739-012-9349-1, December 22, 2012). Wolfe, Charles T. 2013a. “Sensibility as Vital Force or as Property of Matter in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Debates.” In The Discourse of Sensibility: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment, edited by H. M. Lloyd. Dordrecht: Springer, 147–170. Wolfe, Charles T. 2013b. “Vital Materialism and the Problem of Ethics in the Radical Enlightenment.” Philosophica 88, 31–70. Wolfe, Charles T. 2014a. “Epigenesis as Spinozism in Diderot’s Biological Project.” In The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Ohad Nachtomy and Justin E.H. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 181–201. Wolfe, Charles T. 2014b. “Materialism.” The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century Philosophy. London: Routledge, 91–118. Wolfe, Charles T. 2015a. “Diderot and Materialist Theories of the Self.” Journal of Society and Politics 9:1, 75–94. Wolfe, Charles T. 2015b. “Was Canguilhem a Biochauvinist? Goldstein, Canguilhem and the Project of Biophilosophy.” In Medicine and Society, New Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (Philosophy and Medicine 120, 2015), 197–212. Wolfe, Charles T. 2016. Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Wolfe, Charles T. and Motoichi Terada. 2008. “The Animal Economy as Object and Program in Montpellier Vitalism.” Science in Context 21:4, 537–79. Concluding (Irenic) Postscript 321 Wolfe, Charles T. and Michaela van Esveld. 2014. “The Material Soul: Strategies for Naturalising the Soul in an Early Modern Epicurean Context.” In Conjunctions of Mind, Soul and Body from Plato to the Enlightenment, edited by D. Kambaskovic. Dordrecht: Springer. Zammito, John H. 2003. “‘This Inscrutable Principle of an Original Organization’: Epigenesis and ‘Looseness of Fit’ in Kant’s Philosophy of Science.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 34, 73–109. Zammito, John H. 2004a. A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zammito, John H. 2004b. “Reconstructing German Idealism and Romanticism: Historicism and Presentism.” Modern Intellectual History 1:4 (2004), 427–38. Zammito, John H. 2006. “Teleology Then and Now: The Question of Kant’s Relevance for Contemporary Controversies over Function in Biology.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37, 748–70. Zammito, John H. 2010. “Should Kant have abandoned the ‘Daring Adventure of Reason’? The Interest of Contemporary Naturalism in the Historicization of Nature in Kant and Idealist Naturphilosophie.” International Yearbook of German Idealism 8, 130–64. Zammito, John H. 2011a. “History/Philosophy/Science: Some Lessons for Philosophy of History: A Review Article of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, On Historicizing Epistemology.” History and Theory 50, 390–413. Zammito, John H. 2011b. Review Essay: William Rehg, Cogent Science in Context: The Science Wars, Argumentation Theory, and Habermas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009, Philosophy and Social Criticism 37:3, 359–65. Zammito, John H. 2013. “The Nagel Flap: Mind and Cosmos.” The Hedgehog Review (November), 84–94. Zammito, John H. 2016a. “Epigenesis in Kant: Recent Reconsiderations.” In Studies in History and Philosophy of Science: Part A 58, 85–97. Zammito, John H. 2016b. “Reill’s Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment and German Naturphilosophie.” In Life Forms in the Thinking of the Long Eighteenth Century, edited by Keith Baker and Jenna Gibbs. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Zammito, John H. Forthcoming. The Gestation of German Biology in the Eighteenth Century: Philosophy and Physiology from Stahl to Schelling. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zammito, John H., with Philip Ivanhoe, Helen Longino, and Phillip Sloan. 2008. “Philosophical Approaches to Nature.” In Altering Nature: Volume One: Concepts of “Nature” and “The Natural” in Biotechnology Debates, edited by B. Andrew Lustig, Baruch A. Brody, and Gerald P. McKenny. Berlin: Springer, 63–136. This page intentionally left blank Index

agency 10–11, 66, 70, 90, 95, 147, body 21–3, 25–8, 30, 32–3, 44–5, 182, 191; 193–6, 225–7, 234–9, 54, 58, 98, 102, 104, 133, 163–5, 278–9, 281, 286–8; “agential bias” 187, 204, 245, 311; knowledges 30; “agential realism” 127, 184, 286; 148; language of 54; without organs hallmark of agency 238; in Hegel 174n3 227, 238; of matter 147, 269, 279; Bohr, Niels 183, 209 moral 122 Braidotti, Rosi 8, 88, 92, 192, 218, 270 Ahmed, Sara 133 brain/mind 49, 50, 60–1n15, 69, Alaimo, Stacy 67, 147, 201 72–5, 76–7, 82–4, 116, 118–19, Alice in Wonderland 201, 204 137–8; “brain-mind” materialism Alquié, Ferdinand 97 50; cerebral form of materialism 49; “animal spirits” 70 consciousness, basis of 120; doctrine Ansell-Pearson, Keith 6, 88 of “the ghost in the machine” 5; Answer to Mr Clarke’s 3d Defence 50 identity of mind and brain 49; mental Anthropocene 2, 5 states 282; soul-body reduction 46 anti-Enlightenment ethos 8 Brault, Claire 148 Anti-Oedipus 164 Bryant, Levi 162 Aristotle 229, 231, 233 BZ reaction 194 Asad, Talal 6 atheism, “Boyle Lectures” against 28 Cambridge Platonists 52 Cancer Journals 147 Baldwin effect 186 capitalism: global 9, 302; infrastructure Barad, Karen 10, 50, 57, 127, 145, and 169–73 184, 201, 208, 246–7; and intra- Carnap, Rudolf 281 action 58, 146, 211, 241, 247 Cartwright, Nancy 82 Beauvoir, Simone de 140 Cassirer, Ernst 304 Behn, Aphra 112 Categories 231 Beiser, Frederick 306 Cavendish, Margaret 112 Benedict, Ruth 157 Ce qui nous fait penser: la Nature Bennett, Jane 5, 59, 124, 147, 155, et la règle 115 262, 270, 277–8 Chalmers, David 119 Bentham, Jeremy 112 Changeux, Jean-Pierre 83, 115 Bentley, Richard 20, 28 Clarke, Samuel 50, 258 Bergson, Henri 30, 91, 214 Clifford, James 157 Big Bang 184 cognitive nonconscious 181–97 bio-lifeforms 188 Cohen, Bernard 31 biopossibility 148 Collins, Anthony 50–1 Birke, Lynda 145 Considerations concerning vital Bodies that Matter 145 principles 253 324 Index constructivism 251–3, 261–3, 264n2; Epicureanism at the Origins of alternative to 262; complaint about Modernity 253 261; criticism of 263n2; materialism epigenesis 304 and 250; objections to 251 evolution 186–90 Coole, Diana 4–5, 66, 89, 113, 270 Creative Evolution 214 fascism 125 Crick, Francis 60n6 feminism 92, 131, 133–6, 139, 140, 143: Critique of Pure Reason 114 focus of 134; intervention in 133; Cudworth, Ralph 20, 23 new materialism and 132; old 135; posthuman 92; problem for 148; Darwin 122 science-friendly narrative 136 Davis, Noela 133 Feuerbach and the End of Classical Death of Nature 53 German Philosophy 6 DeLanda, Manuel 201, 208, 211 finality 230–2; end-in-itself 236; final Deleuze, Gilles 6, 94, 183, 214; cause, freedom, and normativity constructed character of the 232–6; of nature, 254, 257; real 91; human emancipation “teleological judgment” 234 88, 99; late Deleuze 103–5; and Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de 50 new materialism 88–106; “plane force 3, 9–10, 27–8, 56, 60n5, 67, 72–3, of immanence” 91; politics of 78, 81, 84, 89–90, 94–6, 99, 114, renaturalization 93–6; on Spinoza 155–6, 159–60, 163, 173, 182–3, 88, 98–103; virtuality 92 185–6, 188–90, 191–5, 193–5, 205, De Rerum Natura 6, 31, 38n57, 54, 207, 277–8, 282–3, 289–90, 304, 216; see also On the Nature of 305; innate 27; motion and 303 Things Fore, Devin 203 Descartes, René 4–5, 7, 19–23, Foucault, Michel 7, 89; “permanent 24–30, 31, 32–4, 35n20, 38n58, critique” 11n13 39n62, 44–6, 69–74, 85n10, Fraser, Nancy 277 97, 301; Cartesian-Newtonian freethinkers 256–8 legacy reconsidered 19–34; “first freedom: degrees of 30, 127, 237; Hegel law of nature” 23; new wave of and 232, 236, 248n9; as progressive scholarship on 21–5, 34n8 self-determination 236 Deschamps, Dom 50 Freud 51; and psychoanalysis 142 detachment theory 227–47; and Frost, Samantha 4–5, 58, 66, 89, 113, normative agency 236–41 270 Dewey, John 58 d’Holbach, Baron 44 Gaultier, Abraham 47 Diderot, Denis 44, 46, 51 Geertz, Clifford 156 Ditton, Humphry 50 Geisteswissenschaften 114 DNA 186, 302, 311 gender and sex distinction between 125, Dujardin, Felix 118 135, 140, 263; femaleness as “raw Durkheim, Emile 158, 166 material” 142; labor power 142; 139–46; and nature 139–46; and new “economic man” 122 materialism 131–50 The Elementary Structures Geuss, Raymond 274 of Kinship 142 Gleick, James 203 Ellenzweig, Sarah 1, 19, 69 Glover, Richard 30 Emden, Christian 10, 269, 306 God 22, 25, 99 enchantment 5, 33, 309–12 Goethe 305 Engels, Friedrich 6, 45, 142, Grosz, Elizabeth 89–90, 94–6, 127, 208, 303 185, 190 enzymology 228 Guattari, Felix 172 Epicureanism 6, 112, 125 Gulliver’s Travels 201 Index 325 Habermas, Jürgen 274 Kruse, Mark 184 Han-Pile, Beatrice 88 Kuhn, Thomas 309 Haraway, Donna 131, 214, 276, 301 Harman, Graham 218 Lærke, Mogens 9, 113, 250 Harrison, Peter 5 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de 51, 55 Hartley, David 50, 73 Landa, Manuel de 88 Hayles, Katherine 9, 57, 181 Latour, Bruno 5, 270 Hebb, Donald O. 69, 76; Hebb’s Laursen, John Christian 255 rule 76–7 Leask, Ian 25 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 11n7; Lecrivain, André 30 critique of Spinoza 220n20, 266n40; LeDoux, Joseph 77, 83 detachment theory 229, 234; Leibniz 253; reconsidering natural dialectics 240, 309; freedom 232, theology 258–60; and Spinoza 235–6, 248n9; historicity of reason 260–3 307 L’Esprit de Spinoza 258 Heidegger 115 Letters to Serena 28, 49 Helmholtz, Hermann von 60n5 Levinas, Emmanuel 279 Hekman, Susan 67, 201 Levi-Strauss 142 Hill, Emita 57 L’Homme-Machine 46–7, 51 Hird, Myra 2, 133 linguistic turn 2, 4, 11n3, 115 history 4–7 living systems, materiality of 48 Hobbes, Thomas 9, 36n24; 112, Locke, John 56 115, 263n7; political invention Loeb, Jacques 303 of religion 255–6 The Logic of Sense 96 Honey, I Shrunk the Kids 205 Lorde, Audre 147 Hubbard, Ruth 140 Lowrie, Ian 10, 154 Hull, David 307 Lucretius, Titus Carus 6, 31–2, 37n49, Husserl 115 54, 96, 100, 111, 112, 216 hybridity 302, 306 Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of hylozoism 52, 304 Classical German Philosophy 208 Luhmann, Niklas 164 Idealism, German 84, 85n16, 232, 305; absolute 227, 236, 263n2 machines 67, 155–6, 161–5, 170, identity 94 173, 302 Immortality of the Soul 24 Mackenzie, Adrian 133 inertia 19–34 Mahmood, Saba 6 The Inner Life of a Cell 201 Malabou, Catherine 9, 68, 78 Intensive Science and Virtual Malinowski, Bronislaw 164 Philosophy 211–12 Marcus, George 157 Israel, Jonathan 25 Marx, Karl 1, 51, 142 Marxism 59–60n4 James, William 69, 75 materialism, origination of 89, 250–63; Johnston, Adrian 69, 78, 214 anti-finalism 258; “chemical” 53; Epicurean 112; historical Kant, Immanuel 62n28, 111, 113, 232; materialism 293n4; materialist and detachment theory 229; moral methodologies 146–9; mechanistic and political views 114, 121, 233–4, 44, 48; old materialism 4, 30, 133, 238, 269, 271, 285, 292 135; “unmasking tendency” of Keiser, Jess 66, 311 materialism 58; “visceral” 309–12; Kepler 20 vital 305 Kitcher, Philip 306 Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Korsgaard, Christine M. 282 Introduction 310 Kroeber, Alfred 157 materialism, new 1–11, 19, 155–6; 326 Index and active matter 19; and monism 148–9, 202, 230, 233, 236, 269, 84n1; narrating new materialism 304; “death of Nature” 300; first 133–4, 149–50; and the natural 68, 70, 84, 282; and gender 139–46; sciences 2–3 manipulation of 59, 142; philosophy materiality (science and ontology) 7–9 of 46, 97, 208, 302; second 68, 238, matter 5, 21–2, 44, 47, 50; “active” 248n10, 282 or agential 51–3, 67, 147, 269, 279; “natureculture” 132 automatic 52; Cartesian-Newtonian Naturwissenschaften 114 understanding of 45–6; distinction neuroplasticity 69–70, 72, 78 from extension 26; dynamic 149; New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, living 276; Mauss, Marcel 166; and Politics 113 mechanistic 24, 44, 46–8; Newton’s Newton, Isaac 20, 28; “Cartesian- characterization of 27; passive or Newtonian” legacy 19, 26, 34n1; inert 24, 26, 51–3, 73, 305 neurophysics 60n15; political McDowell, John 68, 238 pressures on 37n42 McMullin, Ernan 27 Nickles, Thomas 308 mechanism 33, 46–7, 55, 76, 77, Nicole, Pierre 52 82, 99, 143, 148, 186, 203, 236, Nietzsche, Friedrich 51, 91, 95, 273, 291, 303, 314n7; terminological 313n3 complexity of 11n11; theological Nietzsche et la philosophie 95 appropriation of 20 normativity 103, 239, 269–73; ethical Meditations on First Philosophy 21 norms 272, 277; moral law 101, Meeting the Universe Halfway 208, 211 276; moral relativism 107n7, “megamachines” 162 263n2; natural law or right 100; Meillassoux, Quentin 261 normative force 10, 240, 283; scales Merchant, Carolyn 53, 300 of 285–92 Mersenne, Marin 20 Mill, John Stuart 112 ontology: flat 156, 173, 212–13, monism 66, 70, 80, 86n17, 214, 216, 218, 239; “horizontal” 68; Object- 221n28; “flat” 78; scale variance Oriented 155; “onto-epistemology” and 200, 217; Spinozism and 201; “relational” 58 218–19n2 Observations on Man 73 More, Henry 20–5, 48, 52 On the Genealogy of Morality 95 Morton, Timothy 277 On Growth and Form 204 Moss, Lenny 9, 127, 227, 306 On the Nature of Things (see also De motion 22–3, 27–31, 35n14, 36n24, Rerum Natura) 111 37n45, 38n58, 207, 216, 228–9, Opticks 26 303 The Organization of Behavior 76 Motion essential to Matter 49 Ortner, Sherry 140–1 Mouffe, Chantal 274 Mumford, Lewis 162 Paganini, Gianni 255 Murphie, Andrew 133 Parikka, Jussi 186, 188 Parisi, Luciana 186 naturalism, philosophical 274, 286, Parité de la vie et de la mort 47 300–12; “enchanted” materialism, Parts of Animals 231 “visceral materialism” and natura party of humanity 111–27; fascism naturans 309–12; “Neurath’s boat,” 124; Russian Revolution, 301 Communist regimes 113 naturalistic fallacy 281; how not to Pemberton, Henry 30 avoid the naturalistic fallacy 278–85 Pickering, Andy 308 natural theology 258–60 plasticity 66–84; see also nature 20, 23, 28, 30, 38n58, 94, 96, neuroplasticity 105, 126, 128n11, 135, 138, 144, Plessner, Helmuth 247 Index 327 politics (normativity and political Schlick, Moritz 303 theory) 9–11, 271, 276 Schneider, David 206 The Politics of Women’s science, natural 2–3, 6, 8, 111, 132, Biology 140 134–6, 146, 200, 202, 208, 210–11, Pope, Alexander 44 219n8, 273, 275; disciplinary objects posthumanism 7, 126, 269–71, of 146; engagement with 3; feminism 275–8 and 135; “natureculture” and 132; The Posthuman 191 physics 6, 210; scale variance 202; Powers of Ten 201 spontaneous activity 228; terms Priestley, Joseph 51 219n8 Principia 20, 29 scientism 123–4 Principles of Philosophy 21 The Second Sex 140 Principles of Psychology 75 Serres, Michel 217 sexual selection 190 “queering” 131 Sharp, Hasana 94 Quine, Willard Van Orman 274 Simondon, Gilbert 91 Quod animi mores 48 Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Radical Enlightenment 56 Centuries 255 Rappaport, Roy 166 Smith, Neil 209 Rawls, John 276, 283 society 158–61; capitalism and Reader, Soran 30 infrastructure 169–73; culture 156–7; reductionism, physical 46, 285, 302, human-nonhuman boundaries 154; 303, 315n15 ideal systematicity of the social 154, Reill, Peter Hanns 305 161; social organization 164; social religion 35n20, 92, 112, 125, 254–7, processes 154–74 258–9, 261, 266n30; Christian Sorell, Tom 123 religion 123; as divisive force 123; Spinoza 30, 34, 39n62, 96, 100, 262; ideas threatening to 22; myth of 92; and Lucretius 100 as political invention 253 Spinozism 304 Remond, Nicolas 254 spontaneity 228; immanent 305 Reply to Mr Clarke’s Defence 50 Strawson, Galen 119 Réponse à un théologien 47 Sullivan, Nikki 134 The Republic 256 supernaturalism 31 Rêve de D’Alembert 53 Ricoeur, Paul 115, 123 Tarde, Gabriel 154 Robbins, Bruce 6 Thalos, Mariam 201 Rubin, Gayle 141–2 Them! 203 Rumore, Paola 46 Théorie des tourbillons cartésiens Russian Revolution 113 (Theory of Cartesian Ruyer, Raymond 91 Vortices) 50 Thompson, D’Arcy 204 Sahlins, Marshall 156 Thompson, Evan 57 Sartre, Jean-Paul 57, 115 Toland, John 28, 47, 49 Sawday, Jonathan 44 Traité de l’âme 54 scale variance 200–18; Bohr’s theory of Traité des trois imposteurs 258 complementarity 209; climate system Treatise of Man 70–1 217; “fictions of scale” 11n19; natura Turner, Victor 156 facit saltum 214–18; normative scales 285–92; scale in Barad and DeLanda Uncertainty Principle 183 208–13; scale domains 200, 207; “scale effects” 201; self-similarity of scales Venel, Gabriel-Francois 46 213; versions of scale variance 202–7 Vibrant Matter 262 328 Index vitalism 6, 30, 45, 48–51, 53, 55, Wilson, Margaret Dauler 253 59, 112, 200, 278, 304, 305, Without Hierarchy: The Scale 314n6 Freedom of the Universe 201, 215 Voltaire 49 The World 19, 21, 30 Wolfe, Cary 270 Wartofsky, Marx 300 Wolfe, Charles 6, 44, 69, 310 Westfall, Richard 24, 27 Woods, Derek 8, 200 Wheeler, William Morton 213 Writing Culture 157 Willey, Angela 125, 131 Wilson, Catherine 111, 253 Zammito, John H. 1, 300 Wilson, Elizabeth 148 Žižek, Slavoj 33