Fictionality in New Materialism: (Re)Inventing Matter

Fictionalizing the Non/Human

The genealogy of new materialism is complex and tricky. It has important early precedents in both ANT approaches from science and technology studies as well as the corporeal turn in feminist theory, not to forget vitalist strands of Deleuzian philosophy. In the late 2000s, however, a series of significant publications all showing a renewed interest in the agency of matter emerged almost at once, conjuring up the exciting promise of new modes of inquiry and lines of argumentation to be explored in the humanities and social sciences. One of the most central works in this rapidly growing field was Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010). ³

The main philosophical project of this book is to reconfigure a widespread habit in contemporary western thought to parse the world by means of an anthropocentric logic that divides everything into either ‘dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us, beings)’ (Bennett, 2010: vi). To do this, Bennett develops a materialist (re)interpretation of the vitalist philosophies of Henri Bergson, Hans Driesch, Gilles Deleuze, and Manuel DeLanda, adding a bit of Bruno Latour along the way; but she also, in the book’s first chapter, turns to the fictional work of Kafka. Moving swiftly from a philosophical argument proposed by DeLanda concerning the ability of inorganic matter to self-organize, Bennett switches to a reflection on the protagonist of the short story ‘Cares of a Family Man’ (1919), proposing this character as some sort of speculative figure that plays out DeLanda’s ideas of impersonal life.

As a spool of thread with the ability to walk and talk, the protagonist fits the purpose well. Ordradek – yes, he/it has a name too – ‘lurks by the turns in the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance hall. Often for months on end he is not to be seen; then he has presumably moved into other houses’ (cited from Bennett, 2010: 8). And if you ask for his/its name and address, he/it will answer in clear intelligible wording: ‘No fixed abode’, and chuckle a laughter that ‘has no lungs behind it’ (p. 8). For Bennett, these bizarre qualities make Odradek an effective transgressive figure that resists the dichotomy of dull matter vs. vibrant life. ‘Wooden yet lively, verbal yet vegetal, alive yet inert,’ she writes, ‘Odradek is ontologically multiple. He/it is a vital materiality and exhibits what Gilles Deleuze has described as the persistent “hint of the animate in plants, and of the vegetable in animals”' (p. 8).

Bennett’s use of Kafka’s short story is symptomatic of the first type of fictionalization I want to look at here, namely fictionalizations of non/human entanglements. With this phrase I am referring to the tendency of new materialist scholars to advance ontological ideas that turn the non-human human and the human non-human by switching into a mode of writing that deliberately signals invention. We all know that Odradek is not a real person; the text clearly gestures at his unreal status; and yet, Bennett nevertheless finds him useful for advancing her argument about the vitality of things. The obvious question is this: What does fictional discourse allow new materialist thinkers like Bennett to do that makes her willing to leave, at least for a moment, the factual register of DeLanda and Co.?

Bennett does not explicitly reflect on this question, neither does she comment on the epistemological challenges of using Kafka’s fiction to illustrate ideas held as true. She does, however, provide a brief remark elsewhere on a particular fictional device that is also at work in Odradek’s story, namely the practice of bestowing non-human entities with qualities normally thought of as human: anthropomorphism. While making non-human entities seem more human might at first sight look like an anthropocentric gesture, anthropomorphism, in Bennett’s view, also has the potential to open human perception to a whole world of resonances and resemblances that precisely cut across human/non-human-divides. ‘In revealing similarities across categorical divides,’ she writes, ‘and lighting up structural parallels between material forms in “nature” and those in “culture,” anthropomorphism can reveal isomorphisms’ (2010: 99). Anthropomorphism, in other words, is not always a device for turning non-human entities into mirrors reflecting human concerns. For Bennett, anthropomorphism can also work the other way around, rendering human traits a mirror reflecting hitherto unnoticed activities and processes of the non-human. ⁴ The story of Odradek, then, becomes more than an existential story of Man’s experience of getting lost projected onto the blank canvas of things. By granting a spool of thread the ability to walk and talk and thereby evade the attempts of the narrator to fixate his/its nature and location, Bennett’s appropriation of Kafka’s story might afford the sense that humans are not the only beings in the world with the capacity to self-organize, play tricks ⁵ or escape attempts of fixation.

Bennett is often adopted as a key representative for new materialism, but similar types of fictionalization are also at play in many other strands of this field. Take, for instance, Dominic Pettman’s innovative writing in Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less than Human (2017). Even though this study turns to animality rather than materiality as such, its exploration of one of the most anthropocentric concepts thinkable – ‘love’ – echoes the founding gestures of Bennett’s work. The aim, he writes, is to ‘resist the old habit of “ontological apartheid”’ (2017: x) that separates the human from the non-human by erecting a conceptual and perceptual wall between the two. And, like Bennett, Pettman too turns to fictional discourse, exploring the extensive presence of animals and animality in narratives on love. These narratives, he argues, build on metaphors, allegories, and analogies that might at first sight seem to instrumentalize the non-human as simple illustrations of human conundrums; yet, in many cases, Pettman writes, they also work as ‘a much-needed mnemonic for the fact that we are always already becoming-animal, because we never successfully become-human in the first place’ (p. 113).

In that sense, the main motive behind Pettman’s turn to fictional discourse is zoomorphism rather than anthropomorphism. Whereas Odradek’s human traits worked to show how non-human entities are, in fact, not that different from human ones, the becoming-animal of Man in Pettman’s many examples are adopted to reveal that we humans are not even fully human. When a young princess has to contend with a horny toad-like frog in the Grimm Brothers’ classic tale, ‘The Frog King’, the animal imagery, Pettman writes, should thus not be dismissed immediately as an anthropocentric metaphor that merely mirrors the discomforts of those unfortunate princesses who, back in the day, were forced to marry old wrinkled monarchs. Instead, such narratives should be appreciated for their ‘tacit acknowledgment of our own creaturely loves (and aversions)’ (2017: 70). They remind us of the sometimes grotesquely animal nature of love, its slimy textures and belligerent mingling: ‘Creaturely love,’ Pettman concludes, ‘is not all swanlike maidens and panther-like men. It can just as often be embodied in a wheezing bullfrog, with the sticky finger pads and curling, gibblety lips reminiscent of one’s creepy uncle’ (p. 70).

Again, the puzzling idea is that such reminders are supposed to work even though we do not believe the frog king to be true in any literal sense. To underscore the obvious, Kafka’s anthropomorphisms and the Grimm Brother’s zoomorphisms are not matters of fact but matters of fiction. By ascribing human traits to non-human entities and non-human traits to human beings, these stories surely violate the widely held truth regime in which the human is alive and active while the non-human, conversely, is dead and passive; and yet, it makes no sense to accuse Kafka of lying. There are no false statements in ‘Cares of a Family Man’. There are invented ones. Fictionalizing non/human entanglements, then, allows new materialist thinkers to, at least momentarily, sidestep questions of falsehood and truthfulness, while at the same time proposing new post-anthropocentric ontologies by imaginative and affective means. The stories adapted here are supposed to convince, not because they are true, but because they do not have to be. Readers are provided an opportunity to imaginatively and affectively sense a world in which the non-human is partly human, and the human is partly non-human, without having to believe that a spool of thread can run and talk in any literal sense.

Fictionalizing Science

Although the field of new materialism shows an interest in fiction, it would be wrong to frame literature as its only source of inspiration. Whereas the occupation with semiotics, text, and signification that characterized most poststructuralist offshoots in the 1980s and 90 s drew heavily on insights and vocabularies from literary studies, the field of new materialism instead manifests a new turn toward the natural sciences within the humanities and social sciences. Leaving behind some of the old grudges from the science wars, its key figures seem eager to integrate insights from disciplines that have often been perceived as wholly different ballparks – physics, ecology, biology, etc. – adding to these insights critical interpretation, cultural contextualization, and philosophical innovation.

Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010) is one of the prominent examples of this trend. Correcting the so-called ‘somatophobia’ (see also Kirby, 1991: 10) of prevailing feminist theories inspired by constructionism, ⁶ Alaimo argues that feminists need to expand their interest in the semantics of gender to include biological ideas of embodiment. Doing so, she writes, would not only relieve feminist theory from the spectre of nature that allegedly haunts its works; it would also enable more attentive analysis of some of the hazards of living as a vulnerable and open material body in an ever more toxic ecology of imperceptible dangers. Following this line of thought, her own book draws heavily on scientific insights as she critically analyses various types of social organization that trigger unhealthy, sometimes even deadly, processes of trans-corporeal exchange.

Noteworthy in this context, however, is Alaimo’s refusal to settle with scientific insights. She praises biological knowledge of the various ways in which toxic ecologies can cross seemingly steady boundaries between inside and outside as indispensable; and yet, even though the hegemony of textualism is declining in feminist theory and the humanities in general, this knowledge just as often figures in fictional as in factual discourse in Alaimo’s work. In broad terms, this is the case throughout Bodily Natures, but for the purpose of illustration let’s focus for a moment on the third chapter’s analysis of Ana Castillo’s novel So Far from God from 1993. Concentrating primarily on the ill-fated story of ‘Fe’, Alaimo’s main move, here, is to dramatize the affective weight of really realizing the intimate exchanges between body and environment revealed by the biological sciences. At her job, Fe cleans components for military weapons, and she does so with a chemical she is told is harmless. At a crucial point in the narrative, however, Fe, and with her the reader, begins to realize not only that the chemicals are toxic, but also that she has been handling them far too carelessly. As a manual informs her all too late, the chemical should never be left to evaporate ‘because, in fact, it was (and this part really got to her) heavier than air’ (cited from Alaimo, 2010: 75). While alluding to the chemical’s density, the sentence hits Fe with the gruesome force of poetry: Where did the toxic liquid go, she screams in horror – ‘IF NOT IN ME?’ (p. 75). Accordingly, the mentality of out of sight, out of mind gives place to an awareness of the body’s entanglement with risky environmental forces and affects her subsequent ways of feeling, thinking, and acting, until she finally ‘disappears from the text, becoming as invisible as the substance that killed her’ (p. 75).

As in the case of Bennett’s and Pettman’s work, we might wonder what fictional discourse allows Alaimo to do that makes her willing to let biology’s matters of fact become the stuff of invention. In short, why fictionalize scientific insights? It is tempting to explain this peculiar manoeuvre by pointing to Alaimo’s training as a literary scholar; but I think there is a more general case to be made here. As the title of the chapter ‘Invisible Matters’ attests, the scientific insights underpinning her analysis of transcorporeality often centre around phenomena that are, in essence, non-phenomenological. While my body surely registers when toxic chemicals penetrate my skin, the diminutive scales of such transgressions make them unlikely to ever attract conscious attention; and as much as science might convince me of the existence of such transactions, I still have a hard time really feeling them. What the story of Fe provides, then, is the dramatization of an affective transformation that the scientific knowledge ought to generate. As the protagonist reads the information in the manual and realizes the cause of her own demise, the text offers an opportunity to empathize with the feeling of fully realizing one’s embeddedness in a world of (sometimes dangerous) transcorporeal forces. In that way, the adaptation of Castillo’s novel allows Alaimo to supplement the logics of rationality underpinning her scientific arguments with fictional imageries that work through affective identification.

The fictionalization of science in Alaimo’s work is but one instance of a broader trend in materialist thinking to believe in the value of the natural sciences, while at the same time accentuating that the presentation of established and valid scientific knowledge is not always enough. A similar, yet in other respects very different, example of this idea can be found in Astrida Neimanis’ book Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017). Bringing phenomenology into the field of new materialism, the primary aim of this book is to develop a phenomenological practice that can help cultivate a better sense of the scientific fact that everybody is a body of water. As embodied beings, Neimanis writes, each one of us is traversed by the moisture of the air we breathe as well as the liquid we drink; we even carry with us tendencies and traces from a phylogenetic past of oceanic life. Neimanis admits, however, that ‘it is not immediately clear how the tools of an embodied phenomenological analysis would be applicable to experiences that are below or beyond human-scaled perception’ (2017: 53). In other words, how does one trace the wateriness of distant pasts or the body’s microscopic internal seascapes? To address this question, Neimanis suggests a methodological reconfiguration of phenomenological modes of investigation by turning to the sciences for so-called ‘proxy stories’. The main idea is that such stories can work as ‘amplifiers’ or ‘sensitizers’ that augment an embodied attunement towards our own watery becomings (p. 59). In short, we are simply more prone to feel or sense the wet phenomenology embedded in our bodies if we learn about the biological similarities between human and dolphin embodiment, or consider the idea that dreaming about water might constitute a phylogenetic memory of the oceanic environment of our animal ancestors or ‘fishy beginnings’ (pp. 132–5), to use one of Neimanis’ many witty puns.

Of particular interest in the context of this article, however, is Neimanis’ somewhat indifferent acknowledgement that several of the scientific theories she draws on are severely contested in their own disciplines, some even proven to be outright false. ‘[I]n many ways,’ she writes, ‘the definitive truth of the story is not really the point’ (p. 136). In fact, Neimanis even confesses to being ‘intrigued by the power of the “wrong theory”’ (p. 137). Although the differences between adopting traditional literature and proxy stories like these are, admittedly, significant, they both work as fictionalizing devices, in so far as Neimanis and Alaimo clearly testify to their invented status. In both cases scientific insights morph into a register beyond dichotomies of fact or falsehood. One might find this conversion dubious, especially in a world with post-truth regimes on the rise; nevertheless, Neimanis holds that these stories need not be literally true to work effectively as amplifiers or sensitizers for a posthuman phenomenology. The scepticism of certain scientific environments, the argument goes, simply does not prevent these stories from triggering affective experiences of the deep times and entangled genealogies stored in the archives of our bodies. Whereas Alaimo’s adaptation of Castillo’s novel suggests the need to supplement scientific knowledge with affective dramatization, Neimanis’ fictionalization of scientific proxy stories seems to emphasize the affective potential of such stories themselves. In both cases, turning to fictionality becomes a way of capturing intangible relational interdependencies – trans-corporeal toxicities or inescapable hydrocommons – by affective and imaginative means.

Fictionalizing the Future

In tracing the modes of fictionality in new materialism, however, it is not sufficient to consider the motif of non/human entanglements or the interdisciplinary pull towards the natural sciences; one must also, I think, look at the temporal orientations that characterize this field of scholarship. While thinkers like Bennett might find inspiration in old philosophical traditions miscredited as ‘naïve’, much new materialist work, I would argue, carries an inherent futuristic impetus too. As part of their struggle to advance less anthropocentric worldviews and modes of being, these scholars often look beyond the world as it unfolds here and now and into what is yet to come. The fictionalizations of new materialism, therefore, also work to conjure up speculative scenarios of where we might be going.

This mode of fictionality might be most noteworthy in Donna Haraway’s trendsetting book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016). In a distinct style of writing that includes big and small in an ontological weaving of sorts, the chapters braid together stories of carrier pigeons and the medical industry with reflections on the acceleration of the human population. This entanglement of times, places, and beings conjures up a vision of multispecies companionship in a more-than-human world with, as Haraway stresses, just way too many humans. And yet, what makes Staying with the Trouble particularly interesting in this context is the futuristic storytelling of its concluding chapter, ‘The Camille Stories’ (Haraway, 2016: 134–68). Instead of summing up the findings of her inquiry, Haraway ends her book with a piece of speculative fabulation that encourages the reader to imagine life on earth (or Terrapolis, in Haraway’s terminological invention) a mere five generations into the future. Such an extrapolation might at first sight seem unimaginable and, in light of the Anthropocene, dispiriting indeed; but one cannot lose hope, Haraway writes. Critical thinking must at least try to provide new ways of imagining sustainable worlds going forward. Accordingly, Haraway develops a storyline in which the human species, against all odds, succeeds in reducing its numbers by forging new communities with other earthly critters on Terrapolis. The key to this success, she imagines, will be the emergence of local communities that invoke practices of poly-parenting while at the same time tying a companion animal from a threatened species to every new-born, a so-called ‘symbiont’. Switching to a fictional past tense, Haraway summarizes her trans-generational vision:

The Children of Compost came to see their shared kind as humus, rather than as human or nonhuman. The core of each child’s education is learning how to live in symbiosis so as to nurture the animal symbiont, and all the other beings the symbiont requires, into ongoingness for at least five human generations. (2016: 140)

In other cases, however, such speculative fictions operate in reverse. Sometimes, the inventions of future societies work not as a guide that offers advice and direction but as a warning sign that clarifies where we might be going if we do not change our course. This is the case at least in Rebekah Sheldon’s The Child to Come: Life after the Human Catastrophe (2016). The book analyses anthropocentric investments in the figure of the child in a selection of post-apocalyptic science fiction novels and movies, arguing that this figure is particularly attractive in our current efforts to imagine the future of human life. Turning to the beginning scenes of Alfonso Cuarón’s sterility apocalypse Children of Men (2006), she examines, for instance, the cultural dynamics of an imagined future scenario in which all women have suddenly lost the ability to reproduce. In the film’s visionary prospect of global infertility, a sense of panic and nihilism has dissolved most human societies, and in the midst of this chaos, the viewers hear Jasper, an aging hippie, tell a rambling joke about the Human Project, a mythical underground research group dedicated to solving the crisis:

The Human Project gives this great big dinner for all the scientists and sages in the world. They are tossing around theories about the ultimate mystery: Why are woman infertile? Why can’t we make babies anymore? Some say it’s genetic experiments, gamma rays, pollution, same old, same old. Anyway, in the corner this Englishman is sitting. He hasn’t said a word. He’s just tucking into his dinner. So they decide to ask him. They say, Well, why do you think we can’t make babies anymore? And he looks up at them, chewing on this great big wing, and he says ‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ he says, ‘But this stork is quite tasty isn’t it’. (cited in Sheldon, 2016: 153)

Getting Real? Fabulation, Wor(l)ding, Fictionality

So far, I have sketched three modes of fictionalization that invent non/human entanglements, scientific facts, and future societies respectively. I have also been arguing that each of these modes provides appealing styles of writing for the scholars involved. Now, on this basis, it is time to return once again to my initial question: Why does a field of scholarship founded on the ambition of ‘getting real’ seem to attract a type of discourse that is defined precisely by not committing itself to reality?

In the wake of Haraway’s book in particular, other cultural critics have also noticed the tendency to combine fictional discourse and traditional theory in academic writings in and around the field of new materialism. Alaine Waime, for instance, has recently traced the dis/continuities of the concept of ‘fabulation’ from Bergson and Deleuze to Haraway, arguing that the ubiquitous presence of the Anthropocene has once again made this alternative, future-oriented mode of storytelling urgent in the humanities and social sciences (Waime, 2018). In a similar vein, Helen Palmer has suggested that the speculative writing in new materialist work is characterized by what she calls ‘wor(l)ding’ which, in her pun-like phrasing, designates ‘the worlding which occurs in all wording’ (Palmer, 2019: 218). Others, like Sherryl Vint, have explored the overlapping interest of new materialism and the genre of science fiction in challenging ‘complacent notions of reality, sexuality, gender, and even human identity’ (Vint, 2017: 361) by extrapolating contemporary tendencies into the future.

The stylistic experiments of new materialism, it seems, have not gone unnoticed. And yet, not neglecting the originality and usefulness of these studies in general, I do not think they help explain the lure of fictionality specifically. Vint’s work on sci-fi obviously focuses on a specific fictional genre, not the generic traits of fictionality as such. Likewise, Palmer’s innovative notion, while applied in a discussion of Haraway’s speculative writing, deals with the general ability of discourse – fictional or not – to matter, to make new worlds. And while Waime occasionally draws on the language of invention, she still seems somewhat reluctant to locate the practices of fabulation in the realm of fiction, despite their significant similarities. ⁷

In contrast, I would argue that fictionality is precisely what makes these alternative modes of writing so attractive to new materialist scholars. This is so, at least in part, because of what I see as a proper fit between the fundamental nature of fictionality and the ontological claims of new materialism. On the one hand, we are dealing here with a new school of thought that is founded on the provocative ontological claim that things we had hitherto perceived as brute and inert are fundamentally alive. In my view, however, such a claim also poses a rather tricky epistemological problem which fictionality, on the other hand, might help solve.

While returning from the semiotic sphere of discursive constructs to the earthly matters of materiality might at first sight look like opting for common sense and intuitive experience, such a move is, in fact, not as straightforward as it seems. Indeed, claiming that active material activities out there are not the product of discursive constructs raises a somewhat challenging epistemological puzzle. For how does one know, really, that this non-human vitality is not itself an effect of discourses like those advocated by new materialist theory? ‘[A]re these vital qualities of material bodies,’ Žižek asks, not simply ‘the result of our (the human observer’s) “benign anthropomorphism”’ (2014: 9)? Why should Bennett and likeminded believers of her vital materialist creed be able to escape the human, all too human, cluster of semantics, languages, and concepts through which all knowledge of the world must be filtered? Are new materialists not simply ignoring, rather than overcoming, the dichotomy of subject and object that has traditionally (or since Kant at least) stopped any human consciousness from ever really knowing the world it observes? Instead of ‘filling in the gap’, Žižek objects, Bennett turns to anthropomorphism while at the same time admitting ‘that the notion of vitality is beyond our comprehension, that we are moving into an obscure area’ (2014: 12). In the end, this conundrum of ignored dichotomies fuels Žižek’s critique and, in general, seems to mark many other recent skeptical assessments of this movement (see, for instance, Boysen, 2018; Petersen, 2018; Rekret, 2016, 2018).

For Žižek, then, Bennett’s anthropomorphism is merely a way of sidestepping the question of epistemology. But for the new materialist, I would argue, anthropomorphism along with many other types of fictionalization are carefully chosen epistemological tools for trying to overcome Žižek’s gap. Fictionality is deployed, here, not to cover up obscure claims, but to render regions of obscurity less obscure. As we have seen, the three modes sketched above invent non/human entanglements, scientific facts, and future societies to help us see and feel the many non-human activities, attachments and entanglements that might have otherwise seemed beyond intelligibility. The ambition of these inventions, then, is not to fully escape the discursive limits of epistemology, but to mobilize affective and imaginary resources outside reigning anthropocentric regimes of truth. It is obvious, I think, why fictionality fits this purpose. As deliberately signaled invention in communication (Gjerlevsen and Nielsen, 2020), fictionality differs from many other types of discourse by not being committed to reality, or – to be more precise – by not being committed to established versions of reality. In that sense, fictionality can help one reinvent a view of the world that is beyond what counts as real. In its new materialist adaptations, fictionality accordingly transcends anthropocentric epistemes (in the Foucauldian sense of the word) that view non-human life as unreal or ‘obscure’, as it were. Its inventions depart from the epistemological constraints of modernity (Latour, 1993) and conjure up affective and imaginary scenarios of what in a factual register would have been perceived as untrue: agential matter.

In Bennett’s and Pettman’s writings, the anthropomorphisms and zoomorphisms fulfilled this function by inventing imageries of things becoming human and humans becoming animal. Similarly, Alaimo and Neimanis’ fictionalization of scientific discourse was supposed to synthesize affective resonances that had hitherto resided beyond normal phenomenological scopes. And the speculative visions in Haraway’s and Sheldon’s books provided a means to imagine or even feel a future in which non-human beings and processes come to life as either destructive forces or sympoetic companions. Certainly, traits of fabulation, wor(l)ding and sci-fi are at work in the intellectual moves of these scholars. Yet, what unites their deviations from traditional styles of writing is a shared attraction to fictionality as a speculative tool that helps them abstain from anthropocentric regimes of truth while forwarding affective imagery of alternative worlds of lively, recalcitrant, spontaneous, agential, and unpredictable matterings. Getting real, here, means getting beyond what counts as real. Fictionality offers a means of doing so.