Pre- and Post-Dialectical Materialisms: Modeling Praxis without Subjects and Objects

Abstract

begin with three quotations, serving as something between topic sentences and course-headings.' One is from Marx, the other two from the more recent tradition of materialist social thought. Together, they point up what I see as some general interests and aims governing the effort on the part of today's radical thinkers to reconceive both the practical and the categorical relations between culture and nature, the human and the nonhuman, the biological and the mechanical. These statements should also help to distinguish that project from the ecological critiques of industrial and postindustrial capitalism which develop from a conservative humanist position. I refer to writers like Jonathan Bate, who use the rhetoric of intervention to revive the primitivist, essentializing, aestheticizing, and protectionist views of nature that arose in the early 19th century in response to despoliations brought about by industrial capitalism as well as to changes in consciousness promoted by that economic and social transformation.2 Romantic period writing, many canonically definitive forms of which launch an internal critique of bourgeois competitive individualism by way of what