The ‘New Materialism’ and the Fragility of Things

Abstract

The ‘new materialism’ is the most common name given to a series of movements in several fields that criticise anthropocentrism, rethink subjectivity by playing up the role of inhuman forces within the human, emphasize the self-organizing powers of several nonhuman processes, explore dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practice, rethink the sources of ethics, and commend the need to fold a planetary dimension more actively and regularly into studies of global, interstate and state politics. After reviewing several key tenets of this diverse movement in philosophy, biology and the human sciences, we focus on how it casts light on the dissonant relations between the drives of neoliberal capitalism and boomerang effects from nonhuman forces. Exploration of such relations both dramatises the fragility of things today and helps to explain why many constituencies refuse to acknowledge and address it. After presenting a few capital–force-field conjunctions that illustrate the fragility of things, this article briefly explores some intercoded counter-strategies to address the contemporary predicament.