The Material Turn and the Fantasy to Undo Modernity

Abstract

The Material Turn and the Fantasy to Undo Modernity Benjamin Boysen and Jesper Lundsfryd Rasmussen The emergence of the so-called "material turn" (e.g., speculative realism, new materialism, object-oriented ontology, and actor-network theory) has been one of the most influential trends in the humanities and social sciences in the last decades. The ardent call for a reconnection with and immediate access to reality has left a deep impact. As has the critique of modernity for having endowed us with a fatal misconception of human exceptionality, which (it is argued) has led us into our current predicaments—which, above all, means the climate crisis. With the promise to regain immediate access to reality and to teach us ontological humility, the "material turn" embodies a pledge to revolutionize our understanding of the universe and our place in it, allowing us to join forces with new politico-ethical communities stretching across the human and nonhuman realms—thus aiming at establishing a real political and ethical community with things.1 However, discarding modernity and the human subject comes with a heavy price. For the theories advanced in the "material turn" entail serious theoretical, practical, and political problems.2 Scholars within the material turn make ontological claims about the material world that not only seem unusual or even extravagant, but also self-contradictory and unscientific (dogmatic). However, despite this, the theories have been and remain immensely attractive to many scholars in the humanities and social sciences. From a scientific point of view, this is puzzling. We believe that the answer to the reason for its popularity is not so much philosophical or scientific in nature as it is psychological and socio-political. Indeed, the huge popularity of "the material turn" may in itself be taken as a sign of a deep crisis and as one manifestation among others of the dire nature of the global situation now. But though this movement arguably is ill-suited to provide solutions or answers, an insight into the sources fuelling the contemporary desire or craving for such theories may nevertheless prove helpful in shedding light on the basic tenets behind the crisis facing us today. Inquiring critically with Marx about what it is in an epoch or society that fuels the need and demand for such illusions may entail the possibility of better understanding the contemporary sociopolitical crisis of modernity (the discomfort with autonomy, finitude, and secularism) and adjacent phenomena like the [End Page 7] US presidential election of Donald Trump, the last decades' ascend of right-wing populism in the West (but also globally), and the general discrediting and delegitimization of universal institutions and thinking. If we take a closer look on some of the most towering figures within the different branches of "the material turn," we come across curiously identical assumptions, arguments, and hypothesis. Graham Harman (object-oriented ontology), Jane Bennett (new materialism), and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (presence theory) have gained huge popularity with materialistically swayed theories in fields as disparate as metaphysics, political science, and cultural and literary theory. Moreover, they have worked independently of and seemingly without knowledge of one another. Nonetheless, essentially their theories have strikingly similar traits. And to us this is a suggestive indication of a general Zeitgeist in the "material turn" worth enquiring further. These three authors identify modernity and its secularism as the main cause of the current loss of reality. Therefore, Gumbrecht, Harman, and Bennett seek to break with modernity and its twentieth-century advocates.3 According to these authors, modernity has left behind a world without inner moral structures resulting in homeand rootlessness, while postmodernity has furthermore added insult to injury by reducing everything to images, fictions, and play. With the advent of modernity, we have become alienated not only from the world but also from things in the world. The world is thoroughly mediated: it is never seen as itself but only through pictures and language. The magic and inner life of things together with a sense of meaning-and purposefulness have disappeared with modernity as well as postmodernity, which have destroyed our original unity with the world and things. In the critique of modernity, Gumbrecht, for example, problematises the cultural-theoretical priority of...