Materialist Tradition Research Articles

Separate from Class? Toward a Theory of Race as Resource Signal

Abstract In the study of U.S. inequality, social scientists have long sought to tease apart the “effect of race” from the “effect of class” in our analyses. In studies of how individuals make evaluations of the social world, for instance, researchers have asked whether race or class demography shape individual perceptions, how each matters independent of the other, and ultimately which matters more. While this scientific practice is widespread, what I term the race-versus-class paradigm is only one way to analyze the relationship between race and class. The materialist tradition offers a competing approach, asking not how race matters independent of class, but how racism operates through structural, material conditions. To better explain the relationship between “race” and “class” in how individuals evaluate the social world, this paper proposes a theory of race as resource signal. In this alternative approach, race and class are interwoven, mutually constitutive, and dialectically constructed concepts unable to be meaningfully teased apart. I trace the differences in the two approaches through an empirical application, asking how individuals evaluate school quality based on neighborhood race and class demography in a video experiment.

“Winning the Peace”: The Role of International Peace Settlements in the Creation of World Orders – A “Geopolitical Marxist” Perspective

For the discipline of International Relations (IR), the study of International Peace Settlements (IPS) for the organization of postwar international orders has thus far primarily been the purview of realist, liberal, and constructivist approaches. To date, Marxist approaches have tended to either ignore the significance of IPS in the formation of new global orders or have been inscribed into longer-term overarching processes – namely, the reified consequences of the development of capitalism. These proclivities have had the unwelcome effect of subsuming the role historical agents have played in the devising of international ordering strategies under preordained universal “laws of motion” and downplaying the broader efficacy of foreign policymaking in the building of world order. This paper proposes to rectify this Marxist lacuna by highlighting how adopting an approach that elaborates on the principles of Geopolitical Marxism (GPM) in IR can overcome these shortcomings. The paper argues that a radical historicist methodology for analysing these important world-historical junctures retrieves the significance of contextualized agency within the historical materialist tradition and overcomes the issues beholden to structuralist Marxist approaches.

The Formal and Real Subsumption of Gender Relations

Abstract Attempts to unify Marxist and feminist social critique have been vexed by the fact that ‘patriarchy’ predates the advent of capitalism (its transhistorical status). Feminists within the Marxist, socialist, and materialist traditions have responded to this point by either granting patriarchy a certain autonomy relative to capitalism (the ‘dual/triple systems’ approach), or by suggesting that patriarchal relations have a foundational and necessary status in the history of capitalist development (which we term the ‘origins-subsistence’ approach). This paper offers an alternative account of the relationship between capitalism and the transhistorical status of ‘patriarchy’. In aid of a ‘unitary theory’ of Marxist Feminism, we argue that the transhistorical status of patriarchy is better understood through an application of Marx’s concepts of formal and real subsumption. A modified version of these concepts can illuminate not only capitalist appropriation of antecedent social and economic forms, but also its capacity to produce new forms of gendered exploitation and oppression.

Mediating the elemental: an immaterialist ethics for ecomaterialist media theory

ABSTRACT Up until the 19th century, the notion ‘medium’ described the natural elements – e.g. earth, water, fire, and air. John Durham Peters’ media philosophy (2015) demonstrates how contemporary technical media rely on this forgotten elemental dimension; as cultural techniques, media can reveal the elemental’s environmental sense. Against its broader philosophical background, I extend Peters’ account into a ‘trans-materialist’ film-philosophy: I claim that the notion of the elemental stands, and mediates, ‘between’ the materialist tradition – currently operative in ecomaterial media theory (e.g. Cubitt; Ivakhiv; Parikka; Parks; Starosielski; Vaughan) – as well as the ethico-existential, immaterial dimension that belongs to the elemental. Two philosophical readings support this mediating aspect of the trans-material philosophy: Levinas’ immaterialist ethics ([1961] 1969) and Bachelard’s ‘material imagination’. Levinas’ ethics underscore that existence is defined in relation to alterity; the enveloping elemental environment enables developing a relational sense of self. Additionally, Bachelard’s materialism invites us to reimagine our cosmic connection to the material world – and I argue it is the medium of film that expresses this potential most dynamically. As moving audiovisual image, cinema’s technical form fosters, for the immersed spectator, a renewed sense for our elemental environment.

Lauren Berlant on Genre

There is no doubt that the writing of Lauren Berlant is influential in media and cultural studies as well as across gender and feminist studies and other work in critical, cultural and materialist traditions. Given the complexity of Berlant’s work and its integral refusal of taxonomic and hegemonic terms, it can be difficult for the reader to coherently grasp the singularity of even their most powerful concepts. This essay attempts to think with Berlant’s conceptualisation of genre without displacing the concept from their work through representational summarisation. The essay is part close reading, part exegesis and part experimentation – I hope just as Berlant would have wished. Rather than aim for an even description that accounts for Berlant’s various interventions in a measured way, the method of this essay is to think-write with the ellipsis, to undertake a translation that puts to one side the fantasy of mastery but still seeks to deepen our understanding of the intended meaning of Berlant’s texts. For Berlant, intended meanings would be about what something brings into the world. At minimum, this is my best effort at partaking in a cultural studies pedagogy that foregrounds the practice of critical thinking as world making. The essay then offers an invitation to the reader to learn from Berlant’s work about what the theoretical concept of genre can do. Just as this abstract does, the essay moves in and out of convention, where the sociality of affect does its work to congeal, to disturb, to make sense and make senseless. To move on.

Relevant Factors in Research Activity of Ukrainian Social Workers: Postmodern Studies

The article deals with theoretical, practical, partly - historical aspects of scientific research of modern Ukrainian and foreign sociologists and social workers. The aim of the research is to analyze and summarize the following three key aspects: a) historical destructive moments in the development of Ukrainian/Soviet sociology; b) the orientation of the vector of postmodernist research of foreign scholars who had no censorship restrictions on their works; c) the main problematics of current Ukrainian sociological research. The latter, despite their deep materialistic tradition, find opportunities for new non-empirical approaches. In the article with the help of analysis of methodical sources, generalization of their content and presentation and interpretation of individual statistical data the authors substantiate: socio-economic, managerial and pedagogical reasons can systematically present the problematics of the current research of social workers. However, the postmodern aspect, still not "reworked" by the Ukrainian society, has not yet left its final mark on the social research. The international significance of the article lies in the interest of countries of transitional democracies and economies, previously under totalitarian influence, to acquire full emancipation and neo-liberalization concerning social problems and humane ways of solving them.

Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates

Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates

The History of Things in Ralf Andtbacka'sWunderkammer

The History of Things in Ralf Andtbacka's<i>Wunderkammer</i>

The 1931 London Congress: The Rise of British Marxism and the Interdependencies of Society, Nature and Technology

Abstract The Second International Conference of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, held in London in 1931, exerted a profound influence on the historiography of science, giving rise to a new research field in the anglophone world at the intersection of social and political studies and the history of science and technology. In particular, Boris Hessen’s presentation on the Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia successfully ushered in a new tradition in the historiography of science. This article introduces and discusses the London conference as a benchmark in the history of the social study of science within a Marxist and materialist tradition. In contemporary science and technology studies, political epistemology, and the study of society-nature interaction, it is no less relevant today than it was at the beginning of the fabulous 1930s. In reconstructing some important theses presented by the Soviet delegation in London, we aim to revive the conference’s legacy and the approach promoted on that occasion as a pretext to address current debates about society’s major transition toward a new agency and ways of existence in the Earth system. In particular, the London conference invited us to think of the growing metabolic rift between society, technology, and nature, and further reflects a historical moment of profound environmental and political crisis.

A posthuman perspective on early literacy: A literature review

Drawing on research about young children’s literacy development, this review article discusses a recent paradigmatic turn for understanding the child and childhood from human-centerism to posthumanism. Building on the new materialist tradition (e.g., Barad, 2007) and the assemblage theory of Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 1997), the posthuman lens enables researchers and educators to see children as parts of entangled networks of relationships who continuously intra-act with their peers, teachers, materials, and the other nonhuman entities and activities produced constantly by the child-material entanglements. As such, the posthumanist perspective expands the current research on early literacy by offering new possibilities for re-conceptualizing the child, the materials or resources for early literacy, and the meaning of childhood and children’s play. These new ways of seeing the child, the materials, and childhood have also generated new pedagogical practices that are material-oriented, intra-active, and flexible. The review concludes by providing directions for conducting research from a posthuman perspective in the field of early literacy education.

Republican Socialism and Gendered Portrayals of Catholic Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century France

The popularity of Ultramontanism and the political energy provided by Sacred Heart piety gave French Catholicism of the post-Commune era a militant posture, one that republican socialists saw as antagonistic to their political objectives. This article shows that socialists responded by emasculating their Catholic opponents. Drawing on the materialist tradition that emerged from the Enlightenment and Revolution, and highlighting the resignation and emotive nature of radical Catholic piety, republican socialists maintained that religious belief was evidence of inadequate virility. Speaking to the anxieties of the period, which included concerns about racial degeneration and the adequacy of France on the world stage, this gendering of epistemological convictions allowed socialists to argue for the exclusion of religion and the religious male from French politics.

New Materialist Approaches to Fisheries

For the past 40 years, bycatch has been a significant focus of fisheries science and management, yet bycatch has evaded clear definition persisting as a perennial fisheries concern. This article brings insights from new materialism to examine the ontological politics of bycatch. Building on new materialist approaches to oceans and fisheries, the article contributes to the bycatch debate by putting forth a new framework for understanding bycatch as multiple, enacted through the material-discursive practices of science and policy. Through a survey of policy and scientific documents, the article traces the emergence of “bycatch” as a global fisheries issue. The analysis broadens the orderings and normative understandings about human and nonhuman life inflected by post-humanist and new materialist traditions, as well as fisheries science and policy.

Society's ‘New Normal’? The Role of Discourse in Surveillance and Silencing of Dissent During and Post Covid-19

Within the historical materialist tradition, communication is principally understood to occur in concrete social contexts which are continually shifting in real socio-historical environments. Such a view of language and communication enables for an examination of media narratives in fast changing political landscapes surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic, in particular the manner in which normalisation of the discourses of surveillance takes place in the time of the health crisis. In examining surveillance practices and silencing of dissent in capitalism, we point to the dangers of a newly emergent narrative of the ‘new normal’ which threatens a violation of human rights and civil liberties.

"Tree Thinking": The Rhetoric of Tree Diagrams in Biological Thought

Tree-like visualizations have played a central role in taxonomic and evolutionary biology for centuries, and the idea of a “tree of life” has been a pervasive notion not only in biology but also in religion, philosophy, and literature for much longer. The tree of life is a central figure in Darwin’s Origin of Species in both verbal and visual forms. As one of the most powerful and pervasive images in biological thought, what conceptual and communicative work has it enabled? How have the visual qualities and elements of the tree form interacted with biological thinking over time? This paper examines the pre-Darwinian history of tree images, the significance of Darwin’s use of such images, and the development of tree diagrams after Darwin. This history shows evidence of four separate traditions of visualization: cosmological, logical-philosophical, genealogical, and materialist. Visual traditions serve as rhetorical contexts that provide enthymematic backing, or what Perelman calls “objects of agreement,” for interpretation of tree diagrams. They produce polysemic warrants for arguments in different fields. The combination of the genealogical tradition with the cosmological and the logical changed the framework for thinking about the natural world and made Darwin’s theory of evolution possible; the later materialist tradition represents the “modernization” of biology as a science.

Jayar\u0101\u015bi Bha\u1e6d\u1e6da: A Sceptic or Materialist?

The paper examines the Tattvôpaplava-siṁha of Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa, and presents an analysis of his positive arguments that can be traced in the work. Despite the widely held opinion that Jayarāśi was a sceptic or held no positive opinions, the author concludes that, first, Jayarāśi does not fit a standard description of a sceptic. What may appear as an approach to philosophical problems, typical of a sceptic, turns out to be Jayarāśi’s particular method of critical examination on the part of a rationalist. Second, a number of positive views Jayarāśi entertains can be identified in his work (at least seventeen), and most (if not all) of them overlap with much of the doctrine of the Cārvākas and Lokāyatas and materialist tradition recorded as early as the Sāmañña-phala-sutta. Therefore, Jayarāśi should be classified as a representative of the Cārvāka/Lokāyata tradition.

Editor's Column: A Passion for Being

Editor's ColumnA Passion for Being Zahi Zalloua To say that ontology has replaced or dethroned epistemology in the humanities and social sciences would not be an overstatement. The turn to ontology both reflects and shapes a certain passion for being—a hunger for the "real thing," for something that is more than socially constructed. Against the purported hegemony of the linguistic turn, the ontological turn announces a return, in Quentin Meillassoux's words, to "the great outdoors [le grand dehors],"1 that is, a renewed cognitive attachment to the external world. Meillassoux is often credited for reviving a hunger for realism, triggering this philosophical rebellion against the idealism of the linguistic turn and the theorists of the '68 generation. In his 2006 After Finitude, Meillassoux takes aim at post-Kantian philosophies, lamenting the unmitigated "Kantian catastrophe" that brought into existence a dreadful "Ptolemaic counterrevolution."2 From Marxism and phenomenology to psychoanalysis and deconstruction, continental thought has suffered the limitations of what Meillassoux calls "correlationism." "The thesis of the correlationist … is that I can't know what reality would be without me."3 Since we do not have a rational access to the noumena, to things-in-themselves, all we have after Kant, all we are really allowed to consider philosophically, are the transcendental conditions for human knowledge. Consequently, all knowledge claims must be immediately qualified by "for us," that is, for us finite beings. Deconstruction and psychoanalysis are, in this respect, the latest avatars of correlationism. Plagued by Kantian preoccupations, they are blamed for their "attack on reality,"4 for removing us further and further away from the autonomous world of objects. Meillassoux evokes Jacques Derrida's infectious impact on philosophy and the materialist tradition: Ever since Derrida in particular, materialism seems to have taken the form of a "sickened correlationism": it refuses both the return to a naïve pre-critical stage of thought and any investigation of what prevents the "circle of the subject" from harmoniously closing in on itself. Whether it be the Freudian unconscious, Marxist ideology, Derridean dissemination, the undecidability of the event, the Lacanian Real considered as the impossible, etc., these are all supposed [End Page 1] to detect the trace of an impossible coincidence of the subject with itself, and thus of an extracorrelational residue in which one could localize a "materialist moment" of thought. But in fact, such misfires are only further correlations among others: it is always for a subject that there is an undecidable event or a failure of signification.5 For many, what informs, and follows from, an overcoming of correlationism is a subject-free posthumanist sensibility and attitude, an embrace of what Manuel De-Landa names a "flat ontology."6 Flat ontology is an ontology of immanence. It clearly favors Spinozist monism over Cartesian dualism: there is only one kind of being, which in turn rules out the elevation and privileging of one being—the Human—over all others. Accordingly, flat ontology annuls humanism's solipsistic and narcissistic belief in transcendence, declining to engage in philosophy as usual, to indulge, for instance, in the "timeless" question of what is proper to the Human. Flat ontology is suspicious of the ontological singularity of the Human, what makes him (for the idea/l of the Human is always coded as male) distinct from the nonhuman: language, thinking, trickery, laughter, awareness of death, tool-use, mourning, the face, and so on. And yet immanence's relation to transcendence may not be so cut and dried. Rereading Derrida's "sickened correlationism" might point us in a different, and more nuanced, direction. For the partisans of the ontological turn, what sickens theory (psychoanalysis or deconstruction) is its attempt—though ultimately an inadequate one—to get outside the circle of correlationism, to break free from its "transparent cage"7: "it is always for a subject that there is an undecidable event or a failure of signification." The subject of humanism lives on—compromised, to be sure, but still viable. It is still about the subject. Enthusiasts of the ontological turn assure us that there is only one way to exit the orbit of humanism, that one can only truly break with humanism...

Superfood as spatial fix: the ascent of the almond

In the twenty-first century, a widening array of unassuming fruits, vegetables, seeds and grains have been crowned “superfoods.” While many are exotic imports marketed to Western consumers through neocolonial narratives, others are familiar domestically-grown supermarket staples spectacularly rebranded. Why has “superfood” status become so central to the American produce industry? What sort of subjectivities does a superfood cultivate among consumers? This paper charts the ascent of the almond to superfood status as the latest in a series of spatial fixes alleviating the pains of chronic overproduction. The spatial-fix is a material-semiotic process with important psychosocial dimensions often downplayed in the historical materialist tradition. Drawing on historical archives, advertising materials, interviews with current and recently retired almond industry marketing professionals, and observation at the annual industry conference from 2015 to 2018, I show that as almond production surges the industry must constantly work to change the way consumers see almonds (from seasonal specialty to superfood) and the way they see themselves (from sophisticated to superhuman). While consumers resist and reinterpret the shifts in food meanings fashioned to compensate for overproduction, a century of effective material-semiotic fixes attests to the industry’s influence on foodways. The case of almonds is used here to theorize the broader superfood trend and its imagined “super” subjects as produced through the political economy of industrial agriculture. Understanding the political economic underpinnings of superfoods reveals not only the historical foundation of this contested contemporary food phenomenon, but also sheds light on the metamorphoses of food meanings fundamental to agrarian capitalism.

Rethinking Romanticism with Spinoza: Encounter and Individuation in Novalis, Ritter, and Baader

Reconstructing the theories of encounter and individuation among Novalis and his contemporaries affiliated with the Freiberg Mining Academy, this article reconsiders German Romanticism through a Spinozan materialist tradition. Countering the reception of Novalis as a poet and an idealist philosopher of subjectivity belonging to Jena Romanticism, I advance an alternative constellation of his interlocutors that comprises an intellectual tendency around 1800, herein referred to as Freiberg Romanticism. This tradition is characterized by a materialist approach to the questions on forms of life, complexity, and power in the processes of emergence and becoming. In their respective theories of individuation, I show how Novalis, Johann Ritter, and Franz Baader share Spinoza’s materialist ontology of immanence and transindividuality offered in recent interpretations of Spinoza in continental philosophy. In his engagement with Ritter’s theory of Galvanism, Novalis develops a Spinozan logic of integration of individuals in nature. In his appropriation of Baader’s theory of elementary physiology, Novalis articulates the immanent causality in the determination of individuals. Interrogating Novalis’s, Ritter’s, and Baader’s respective epistemo-ontologies through Spinoza’s thought, this article demarcates the limits of Freiberg Romanticism and its potential lapses into animism and vitalism. While Spinoza contributes a strong concept of substance to Freiberg Romanticism, regulating and problematizing the equivocations of Novalis and his contemporaries, Novalis contributes to the Spinozan tradition a strong concept of encounter.

Neko Case and the Molecular Turn

Few contemporary artists channel the utopian impulses of the nonhuman turn with more creative energy than Neko Case. In her work, the untraceable movements of poisonous gases, the uncanny desires of tornadoes, and the recalcitrant withdrawal of subatomic particles envision an array of transits, elusions, and exit strategies so often denied to the subjects whose bodies, trajectories, and affective lives are policed by the regulatory cultural and institutional forces endemic to heteronormative biocapitalism, particularly poor and marginalized women. Drawing on recent scholarship in feminist new materialism as well as its critics, this essay considers the implications of these imaginings. On the one hand, the modes of agency that Case’s songs invoke frequently entail a circumvention or suppression of specific political interests, making them susceptible to antifeminist and settler-colonialist appropriations; on the other hand, her work potentially offers a vision of the political that refuses to take human action as the inevitable starting point for its theories of power and domination, an increasingly urgent task in an age of ecological catastrophe, when the lives of earth’s most vulnerable gendered and racialized subjects are irreducibly enmeshed in precarious planetary networks of biodependencies that include the actions of microbes, tornadoes, and atoms alike. In Case’s most original compositions, a reductionist materialism attendant to the agency of the nonhuman complements rather than forecloses an older materialist tradition insistent on antagonism between conflicting interest groups as the motor engine of history and the social.

LA IDEA DE ACONTECIMIENTO EN LAS FILOSOFIAS DE ALTHUSSER Y BADIOU COMO FORMA DE REPENSAR LA SUBJETIVIDAD POLITICA.

This paper examines the attempts for rethinking philosophically the political in the works of Louis Althusser and of Alain Badiou in the period in which they face theoretically to the so-called “crisis of the Marxism”. In Althusser's case, former representative of Marxism structuralism, this project is nourished by the philosophers belonging to a materialistic tradition that also recognizes the contingency, and he is interested particularly for Machiavelli, due to his particular approach to the political question. Badiou, former pupil of Althusser, think this question with the category of the event, linked to an exception characterized ontologically in L'Etre et l'evenement. Finally, this article explores in what sense for this authors the occurrence of an event can be linked to the emergence of a subjectivity that exceeds the structural frame.