Just a throw away post. Denunciations of materialism are generally premised on a highly tendentious concept of matter that is of the order of a straw man. The moment you hear terms such as “mechanism” or “reductionism” thrown about, you know you’re before a 17th century corpuscular concept of matter (basically the theory of Democritus and Lucretius) understood as indivisible particles that enter into various combinations. This ignores work done in the sciences over the last three hundred year; and, in particular, the fluid and energetic nature of matter. The concept of matter is unique in philosophy insofar as we don’t begin, in advance, with a concept of matter. It’s not an a priori concept. To be sure, there’s a root intuition– matter is “stuff” or “physical” –but what that might be is an open question: processes, relations between forces, energy? The being or nature of matter is something to be discovered, it is a knowledge to come. It is not something we have already. It is a concept on the way.
Of course, the interesting question here is why materialism seems to evoke so much hostility within the humanities? Materialism seems unique in raising ire among those of us who work in fields like philosophy and literary theory. What is the source of this ire? Does it arise from unconscious religious commitments about the nature of self or the soul? Is it that there’s a strong tendency towards idealism within the humanities, towards the mind mastering and conditioning and even forming all that is, that gives rise to this hostility? After all, matter is that which resists thought, that prevents concept from swallowing thing (as Adorno well recognized in his concept of a negative dialectics). Given how successful materialism has been in accounting for various phenomena– though it still has a long way to go –hostility towards materialism doesn’t seem to arise simply from inadequacies in the ontology (inadequacies, incidentally, that have a history of being overcome in response to criticism). This is an indication that materialism touches on the real, on that which is other than a correlation.
Larval Subjects . 
July 25, 2014 at 4:10 pm
I use the terms matter and object interchangeably – most of the time anyway. I have never grasped, or rather, never been able to re-grasp my earlier concept of matter. It does not sustain fertile work. Matter as evanescent plasticity; that is both an entertainment and a workable modelling medium.
July 25, 2014 at 4:32 pm
Denunciations of materialism are sometimes based on materialism’s apparent lack of interest in the importance of consciousness. Indeed, one must have conscious, subjective experience in order to contemplate the nature of matter. Matter seems to be secondary to consciousness from this standpoint.
July 25, 2014 at 4:42 pm
Fred, that’s one of materialisms central and most lively research programs. I basically think all standard objections to materialism are effects of these deeper anxieties I cite, not causes of the hostility, ie, they’re rationalized explanations of that hostility in the psychoanalytic sense.
July 25, 2014 at 4:57 pm
I don’t follow. I can’t seem to find a humanities conference that doesn’t have some explicit nod to the new materialisms, scientific or philosophically derived.
July 25, 2014 at 5:04 pm
Yea, tend to agree with you Levi… think of all the associated words it’s usually related to in poetry, literature, etc. : body, substance, mother, evil, disgust, grotesque, etc. Mainly the notions of decay and death seem to hang around it along with the whole gamut of those traditions Umberto Eco has so well documented in his On Ugliness as against his History of Beauty, etc. For modern thought I see this total fear of substance based formalisms… everyone wants processual thought, everything in process in motion… against notions of the static and fixed.
What’s weird is that your philosophy gives that materialist perspective onto processes that seems to be lacking in the Process philosophers themselves… most process philosophy hinges on affective relations more than object relations. There seems to be a great divide between notions of affectivity and substance based theories even in new materialisms, which seem to harbor more of an alignment with ethos or ethics as materialism rather than the concrete aspects of matter in process or energetics, etc.
Land in following the undercurrent out of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bataille, D&G and Lyotard resurfaced with the Libidinal Materialism as well…
Even Zizek promotes one based on lack, etc.
It’s tough to make a call, with so many variations of materialist discourses around. Who’s the materialist? I think there is an ill-defined notion of what materialism is in our time, rather than some antagonistic notion of the straw man. There are so many variations without some actual overriding qualification its hard to pin down anymore. Do we take the sciences as base line with energy = mass etc. Or some other line?
July 25, 2014 at 5:09 pm
Drawing,
Then you’re not paying attention… In particular, to how the new materialists have been responded to. Your point is somewhat akin to suggesting Amiericans aren’t predominantly hostile to Marxism because there are American Marxists.
July 25, 2014 at 11:33 pm
Part of the hostility may be that those in the humanities have felt colonized by what Habermas referred to as the “colonization of the lifeworld.” Put simply, money and power have colonized the interpersonal and cultural spheres of life, and so have replaced qualitative communicative relationship with quantitative non-communicative force. And thus a “buy them off” or “vote them out” (quantitative) mentality begins to take the place of any real connection and communication between people.
The supremacy of quantity over quality is a problem, and materialism itself gets blamed for it. There IS a place for quality in materialism, but something else is happening. Quality has become quantized and commodified, and those qualities not easily quantified are devalued or repudiated. So analytical reason (weighing, measuring, calculating, data crunching, quantifying) has been the privileged perspective, the Master Signifier, the One Ring to Rule them All.
In the 1950’s movie “Forbidden Planet” (a take on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”), an advanced civilization known as the “Krell” had achieved the pinnacle of technological supremacy, and yet were destroyed from within by the “monsters from the id.” They were destroyed by their own dreams.
What we have “foreclosed” is destined to appear in the Real. Those qualities which we have repudiated are coming back in our waking nightmares. This is mass psychosis. The angry gods have returned. War. Hyper-Capitalism. Archetypal possession. Zombie apocalypse.
July 26, 2014 at 3:46 pm
I’ve starting paying close attention to where Deleuze and Guattari write about content and expression: each has formations of its own, but it is expression that hits on the part where objections to materialism come in. Language, discourse, sign structures, and everything that dazzled anthropologists for a long while could all be called expressions of specific content of matter/substance (I think they say content is formed substances). Expression is linked and the result of the dynamics and circumstances of content but takes on a whole new *form.
I still think there must be some admission of incorporeal structures – codes that jump out of and latch *onto matter or content – that trans-form the corporeal. But the content-expression link could be studied no doubt.
July 26, 2014 at 6:11 pm
The point to remember about D&G is that there is a matter for both form and expression. At the end of the day, they’re Spinozist parallelists and dual aspect theorists (“the order and connection of ideas is the same as things”). It’s crucial to follow what Deleuze argues about the difference between real, formal, and numerical distinction in Expressionism and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition. For them content and expression aren’t numerically distinct, only formally.
July 26, 2014 at 6:47 pm
In your notion of a concept of matter to come I detect resonances with Kant’s notion of aesthetic (as opposed to cognitive) judgment. We have some intuitive grasp of what matter must be, such that we feel compelled to presuppose universal agreement about it (i.e., your claim that materialism is the only valid ontology). It also seems like you want to say science will eventually determine just what matter is, that we can in this sense trust our intuition to one day provide us with genuine knowledge of matter. This seems something like Kant’s reading of sublime judgments, where although we have no definite concept or even sense of what we are experiencing, we nonetheless feel ourselves to be superior to that which we are attempting to judge. In Kant’s case this was a feeling of moral superiority, but in your case it seems more like a theoretical superiority (although for Kant theoretical reason was ultimately grounded in practical reason, so there’s no real line to be drawn here for him). Is yours, then, an “aesthetic materialism”?
July 26, 2014 at 6:52 pm
…or better, a “sublime materialism”?
July 27, 2014 at 3:49 pm
Matthew,
While I suspect that all knowledge begins, in its earliest phases, with some sort of intuition (in the case of materialism it would be that being resists), what you articulate is not the point I’m making. Just as we have rival theories in physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, etc., where some are eventually abandoned (e.g., the theory of the humors in medicine) we have the same thing in ontology. Ontology began with a series of rival theories as to the nature of being. My view is that in the last three centuries we’ve reached a point where we now know that materialism is the right theory of being and where we can safely exclude other ontologies such as vitalism, dualism, etc. This has become increasingly evident as a result of discoveries in the sciences. Have certain materialist hypotheses been mistaken such that we’ve had to abandon them and, above all, revise them? Of course. But that’s no different than certain hypotheses in evolutionary biology or physics being mistaken and requiring revision. Do we understand everything about matter and do we have answers to all the questions? Of course not. But that’s par for the course in a research paradigm. Indeed, there wouldn’t be a research paradigm at all were there not problems and questions that paradigm is currently working on. My thesis, then, is that at this point in history materialism is the only credible ontology. In earlier phases of history this wasn’t always the case. This is quite different than what you’re suggesting.
It’s also noteworthy that criticisms of materialism are of the same form as arguments leveled against evolutionary biology by creationists and evolutionary design proponents. There you’ll recall that the intelligent design defender doesn’t articulate a positive research program, but instead occupies himself with pointing out explanatory gaps in evolutionary theory. “They haven’t found the missing link yet.” “Evolutionary theory can’t explain how a complex organ like the eye can evolve.” Etc. These, of course, are research projects for the ongoing inquiry that characterizes biology. They aren’t refutations of evolutionary biology; and for the very simple reason that evolutionary biology has been overwhelmingly successful in explaining a variety of things pertaining to species and in making predictions (and for that reason, we don’t abandon the theory simply because it hasn’t happened yet). We hear similar styles of argument among critics of materialism: “It hasn’t yet explained consciousness.” “It can’t explain meaning.” Etc. However, materialism has had an even more successful run than evolutionary biology (the latter, also being a subfield in materialist thought) and for this reason we treat these things, if we’re not equivalent to the creationist, as research projects for materialist inquiry, not as knock down arguments again materialist ontology.