Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics, by Christopher Breu

Abstract

Insistence of Material: Literature in Age of Biopolitics, by Christopher Breu. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 264 pages. The material world has been garnering a lot of critical attention recently, and for good reason. In waning decades of twentieth century, all that was solid seemed to melt into air as scholars emphasized linguistic play, discursive construction, and/or ideological encoding of texts both literary and cultural. But as thinkers such as Lawrence Buell, Bill Brown, Eve Sedgwick, Bruno Latour, Wai Chee Dimock, Cary Wolfe, Franco Moretti, Elisabeth Grosz, and Graham Harman have all observed over past two decades, those critical moves left a lot of stuff out: ecology, things, affect, science, animals, bodies, technology, geology, and so on. Of course, one corner of humanities, occupied by committed Marxists like Fredric Jameson and David Harvey whose work reliably attended to contemporary political economy, never lost sight of material at all. And yet, materialism in today's new veers away from that long-standing tradition of dialectical materialism, emphasizing instead excesses of matter that surpass human subjectivity. (1) That's what makes these materialisms new. (2) Clearly committed to both kinds of materialism, Christopher Breu's Insistence of Material: Literature in Age of Biopolitics stages a provocative encounter between two. He celebrates vibrancy of matter, volatility of bodies, and primacy of ontology while at same time seeking out the material underpinnings of contemporary capitalism's avatar fetishism--that is, our fetishization of immaterial transcendence (21, 22). To do so, Breu turns to a corpus of twentieth-century that he describes as the late-capitalist of materiality--William Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959), Thomas Pynchon's V. (1963), J. G. Ballard's Crash (1973), Dodie Bellamy's The Letters of Mina Marker (1998), and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of Dead (1991)--that he reads as a counterpractice of writing in postmodern era (23). Insistence thus makes two interconnected claims: first, we should not be seduced by immateriality of a capitalism gone virtual but must instead appreciate how contemporary commodity culture relies on biopolitical management of material bodies, offshoring of material production, and real-life immiseration of marginalized populations across global north and south; second, we should not reduce later twentieth-century to postmodern metafictions linguistic turn and must instead appreciate counter-tradition of authors who foreground materiality of contemporary existence. Connecting these two claims, Breu hopes that his investigation into materialist of mid- to late twentieth century will make us more clear-eyed and political in our thinking about status of material world here in twenty-first. After deftly clarifying and constellating his key terms--new materialism, biopolitics, political economy, and postmodernism--in book's introduction, Breu turns in his opening chapter to Burroughs's Naked Lunch as the founding text in tradition of materialist literature that Insistence chronicles (38). One is not surprised to find Burroughs here, championing graphic muck and physical intractability of human condition. But even as Burroughs affords Breu an initial fleshy foray into irreducible materiality of self, writing in Naked Lunch also introduces a complication that Breu will be at pains to parse throughout Insistence: difference--in terms of political utility--between materiality of language and materiality of physical world. Because Breu juxtaposes insistent materiality that he valorizes to what he tends to caricature as the primarily linguistic concerns of much metafiction, texts that highlight materiality of language (e. …