Turning the turn

I Three problems of the new materialism: Ontology, epistemology, and anthropology

For many authors the new materialism translates into a return to ontology, thus the metaphysical claim to grasp the dynamics of being or matter itself. Although the new ontology is characterized as relational ontology, so that being or matter is understood as constituted by contingent and dynamic relationships between material elements, different versions of how to understand this relationality exist. In particular, neo-vitalist versions of ontology co-exist and partly overlap with Karen Barad’s widely discussed ontology, which builds on the model of quantum physics.

In her account, Barad draws on Niels Bohr’s experiments showing that light exists in the form of particles or waves depending on the apparatus of measurement. For Barad, it follows that the relata do not exist prior to the relation but are only configured by and in the relationship which is constituted through the apparatus or a set of apparatuses. In order to distance herself from substantialist versions of ontology, Barad replaces the concept of the thing by that of the phenomenon, which she understands as an ‘ontologically primitive’ relation (Barad, 2003: 815) that is produced by what she calls ‘agential intra-action’. Accordingly, ‘things’ are not fixed and stable substances but only emerge from activities in which both humans and nonhuman beings are involved. In addition to this idea which, in principle, could be understood in a praxeological perspective, Barad introduces the notion of matter as a meta-subject which ‘intra-acts’ with itself. By this move, she reformulates knowledge as a mode of matter’s activity. As Barad contends, ‘practices of knowing cannot be fully claimed as human practices, not simply because we use nonhuman elements in our practices but because knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another part’ (p. 829). As a consequence, epistemology is no longer understood as the critical interrogation of knowledge claims, including the claim to know matter itself. Instead epistemic practices are articulated as part of a metaphysical, even cosmological logic of anonymous forces that shape the world: ‘The universe is agential intra-activity in its becoming’ (p. 818), as Barad puts it.

Similar cosmological narrations characterize a wide range of vitalist approaches that in one way or another refer to the ‘vital materialism’ of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. ² Political theorist Jane Bennett, for example, referring to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘material vitalism’ (Bennett, 2010: x), formulates the project of ‘giv[ing] voice to a vitality intrinsic to materiality’ (p. 3), which she explicitly understands as an ontological project. ³ Another author who builds on Deleuze’s vitalism is Rosi Braidotti. Braidotti takes as her starting point the ‘intelligent vitality or self-organizing capacity’ of matter, and proposes a ‘zoe-centred egalitarianism’ that will show to advantage ‘generative vitality’ as such (Braidotti, 2013: 60). Braidotti, too, formulates an ontological project and claims to reveal the primordial logics of being, or the dynamics of life itself. She says: ‘life, simply by being life, expresses itself by actualizing flows of energies, through vital information across complex somatic, cultural and technologically networks’ (p. 190). Like matter in Barad’s ontology, life here is understood as a primordial, meta-historical and anonymous process.

The structural problem of ontology is twofold, which means that it has both a political-ethical and an epistemological dimension. To conceive of anonymous forces such as matter or life itself that shape and structure political, economic and social relations forecloses an adequate analysis and critique of these relations. This is the case because theoretical attention is geared towards grasping a primordial, pre-human and ahistorical dynamics. As a consequence social critique is relegated to the realm of ethics in the sense of a general – equally ahistorical and unspecific – attitude towards being. The ethical attitude that Braidotti advocates is an ‘amor fati as a way of accepting vital processes and the expressive intensity of a Life we share with multiple others, here and now’ (Braidotti, 2013: 190). It is every bit as cautious as the attentiveness that Bennett calls for. Bennett explicitly distances herself from any analysis or critique of power and domination. The ‘newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers’, Bennett states, ‘will not solve the problem of human exploitation or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin’ (Bennett, 2010: 13). In addition to the problem that this ethical attitude hardly seems adequate with regard to global socio-economic and political realities, including ecological devastation, the question of who is the subject of ethics remains unsolved. As Bonnie Washick and Elizabeth Wingrove have emphasized, the reference to a moral subject stands in fundamental contradiction to a posthumanist position as formulated by Barad, Bennett and Braidotti. Indeed, while ‘the new materialisms in effect invite us to imagine a moral subject’ which responds to an ‘ethical call’, they can hardly explain ‘why we (humans) would adopt’ an ethical stance (Washick et al., 2015: 73).

With regard to epistemology, the attempt to conceive of the totality of being, the quest for a direct and immediate access to being or the real rejects the always precarious and partial position of the epistemic subject. It re-introduces a ‘view from nowhere’, i.e. a privileged position from which everything, or rather matter as such, reveals itself and which cannot itself be scrutinized. For situated epistemic subjects, all theorizing about matter and life would be about certain aspects of life and matter that are relevant under certain conditions and from certain perspectives, but never about the totality of life and matter itself. At the heart of the new materialism’s ontological turn, however, there lies a longing to grasp the totality and truth of being, and the desire to inhabit an uncontested position of knowledge.

This not only rejects the Kantian insight that there is no unmediated access to reality or the thing itself, and that our access to reality is always mediated through reason and understanding. It also undermines any notion of critique and the initial insight of critical theory that social theory and critical epistemology are inextricably bound to each other. Only when knowledge claims and the power relations of knowledge production can be understood as contingent, situated and partial can they become the object of critique and contestation. A critical social theory that is geared towards the analysis and transformation of power relations obviously cannot do without an epistemology of some sort, something that makes it possible to create a critical distance to knowledge claims and to enter into conversation and dispute about them with others.

In addition, the lack of epistemological reflection in the neo-materialist ontologies manifests itself in the authoritative status of the sciences. The role of Bohr’s quantum physics in Barad’s ontological project, or that of early twentieth century biology in Jane Bennett’s vital materialism, which refers to Hans Driesch, or that of molecular biology in Deleuze, Guattari, Braidotti and others is never explained or justified. Why should these contributions from 20th- or 21st-century European and Euro-American science be particularly useful when it comes to understand the eternal dynamics of the universe? The gap between the omnihistorical ontological claims and the historically contingent conceptual means is implicitly bridged by a – once again – highly specific understanding of the relation between philosophy and the sciences, namely naturalism. In the classical formulation naturalism means that that the methods of natural science provide the only avenue to truth, so that philosophy needs to adapt to the natural sciences. With regard to Barad, Joseph Rouse has argued that she develops a new form of ‘metaphysical naturalism’ which, in contrast to other forms of naturalism, does not assume that science constructs ‘a representation of a normative nature but instead reconfigures the world as already conceptually articulated and politically consequential’ (Rouse, 2004: 156).

From another point of view it seems, however, that Barad ‘exploits’ Bohr’s quantum physics in the way that Althusser has described in his analysis of the ‘spontaneous ideology of scientists’. This means that she subjects the scientific findings and insights that Bohr formulated within a specific scientific area and with regard to highly specific research questions in early 20th-century theoretical physics to a philosophical-metaphysical narration. This criticism also holds for those versions of relational ontology that instead of physics refer to biology as primordial truth. A recent example is Catherine Malabou’s contention that ‘the revolutionary discoveries of molecular and cellular biology’ (Malabou, 2016: 431), in particular the categories of epigenesis and cloning, have revealed the potential of ‘a biological resistance to biopolitics’ (p. 438) so that, as a consequence, political theory can be renewed by adopting these scientific insights. Her claim that ‘a new materialism asserting the coincidence of the symbolic and the biological’ (p. 438) is needed, again, is rooted in a vitalism that selectively transposes concepts from the natural sciences into philosophical discourse.

The third problem, which is closely connected to the foreclosure of critical epistemology, is the problem of posthumanism. Despite their differences, the neo-ontological versions of the new materialism converge towards a form of posthumanism that submerges relations of difference, power and domination into a great posthuman ‘we’. If, as Barad puts it, ‘agential intra-actions are specific causal enactments that may or may not involve humans’ (Barad, 2003: 135), no room is left for conceptualizing structural differences between human and nonhuman forms of agency, and neither can we conceptualize differences or relations of power and domination among humans. This holds, in a similar way, for Bennett, who conceives of the ‘world as a swarm of vibrant materials’ that form ‘agential assemblages’ (Bennett, 2010: 107). ‘Persons, worms, leaves, bacteria, metals and hurricanes’, she writes, have ‘different modes and degrees of power’ (p. 107) in the same way as different persons and different worms have different degrees of power. But even if she refers to differences, she does not conceptualize social relations or structures that have historically developed, and which constitute and regulate forms of practice and action. The general problem here is that agency is transferred to anonymous, meta-historical forces like matter or life, and this means that social relations and the practices they result from cannot be adequately analyzed. This includes the highly specific and historically contingent forms of human-nature relations and socio-technological regimes that need to be studied with regard to the very specific and highly stratified assemblages of ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’ agents. To analyze such assemblages would require a differentiated theory of subjectivity which is able to distinguish between the specific forms of dynamics, activity and praxis that characterize the different entities. The concepts of the human, the nonhuman and the posthuman are all far too general with respect to the complex realities they seek to articulate. ⁴

The problem of ideological homogenization, the universalization of particular experiences and subject positions, has been intensively debated with regard to the figure of the human. Marx, in his critique of Feuerbach’s anthropology, argued that the latter tacitly absolutizes the experiences of bourgeois society. Feminist philosophy has revealed in myriad ways the androcentrism of the philosophical constructions of ‘man’ and ‘human nature’, and analyses of the discourse of philosophical anthropology have reconstructed its Eurocentrism and close relation to race discourse. In so far as the figure of the posthuman is an abstract negation of ‘the human’, however, it is shaped by the same concealment of the partial experiences and the situatedness of those who formulate this concept. On a more abstract level, the concept of the posthuman reiterates the problem of false universalism in that it conceals differences among humans and among human societies as well as the specific epistemic subject position from which the concept is formulated. What is new is that the universalist claim now encompasses all living and non-living beings. However, the ‘nonhuman’ world, too, is inadequately addressed through a terminology that does not make any distinction other than that of human/nonhuman.

The problems of ontology, epistemology and anthropology that I have sketched here are problems that strike one immediately if we regard the new materialism as a discursive formation. However, I do not contend that all the positions subsumed under the rubric of the new materialism deal with these problems in the same way. In addition, these problems are by no means specific to the new materialism but are part of the longer history of materialism. In what follows I show how these problems have been articulated and contested within the tradition of historical materialism.

II Versions of historical materialism

The problems of ontology, scientism and to some extent posthumanism, in the sense of a hollowing out of human agency in favor of supra-societal forces such as matter or life, have already arisen in a number of positions within the tradition of historical materialism. The most notable example of this is without doubt Friedrich Engels’ Dialectics of Nature (1873–83). In Engels’ view, the modern natural sciences of physics, chemistry and biology have overcome a static understanding of matter and recognized the ‘eternal circle in which matter moves’ (Engels, 1997 [1873–83]: 334), or rather demonstrated this for the first time by means of ‘strictly scientific research in accordance with experience’ (p. 327). Matter itself, beyond all concrete forms, not only appears here as a scientific object but also becomes a meta-subject that absorbs all human actions. Engels asserts that ‘matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations, that none of its attributes can ever be lost, and therefore also, that with the same iron necessity that it will exterminate on the earth its highest creation, the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at another time again produce it’ (p. 334). As in the cosmological narratives of the new materialism, matter here designates a primordial dynamics that is primarily revealed by the sciences and that surpasses all concrete forms of society, subjectivity and agency.

The political aspect of this scientistic ontology is revealed most clearly in Engels’ parallelization of nature and history. Both, he says, are characterized by the ‘dialectical laws’ which the natural sciences have shown to be ‘really laws of development of nature’ (Engels, 1997 [1873–83]: 357). Engels remains within the bounds of the so-called materialism dispute of the 19th century, which was shaped by the opposition between science and religion, and reduces knowledge about societal relations to the knowledge of the natural sciences. Thus scientific knowledge is referred to as authoritative, so that knowledge about historical and social processes is not considered to be contested knowledge in which the knowing subjects themselves are involved, subjects who are all situated in historically specific power relations.

A similar scientistic-ontological conception of materialism can be found in Lenin. In his Materialism and Empirocriticism, Lenin too is primarily concerned with knowledge of matter as such, or of the objective reality ‘which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations’ (Lenin, 1967 [1908]: 128). In much the same way as Engels, he treats scientific knowledge as a guarantee of ‘objective truth’. Lenin argues that, just as science ‘leaves no room for doubt that its assertion that the earth existed prior to man is a truth’ (p. 121), there can be no doubt about the ‘fundamental tenet of materialism’, which in his view means to claim the ‘existence of the thing reflected independent from the reflector’ (p. 121). This appeal to the sciences, however, leads to an authoritarian model of knowledge according to which conflicts and contradictions can be settled by an appeal to objective and ‘absolute truth’ (p. 133). As a consequence, contested or even antagonistic socio-political interests, wishes, and goals that shape the production of knowledge cannot be taken into account. This elision of social and epistemic conflict correlates with the construction of a linear progress of knowledge that is always already oriented to absolute truth.

In addition, the disregard for the partiality of the epistemic subjects correlates with a passivist understanding of subjectivity. In Lenin’s ontological materialism, subjects are downgraded to passive media in which the dynamics of matter expresses itself. The world is, as Lenin puts it, ‘eternally moving and developing matter…reflected by the developing human consciousness’ (Lenin, 1967 [1908]: 136). Similar to new materialists who claim that a relational and dynamic ontology is per se a critical endeavor, he forcefully rejects any ‘static’ conception of matter (p. 136). However, Lenin ignores the structural epistemological and political problems of articulating social theory as ontology, be it static or dynamic. The implicit claim of a privileged epistemic subject position from which being itself can be revealed ignores the fundamental relation between knowledge and power.

A third example of an ontological version of historical materialism is Ernst Bloch’s speculative materialism. Bloch, however, formulates a theoretical project through which he distances himself from authoritarian forms of historical materialism, and significantly renounces any form of scientism. This means that his notion of matter does not refer to the sciences. Instead he articulates matter as a substratum of the ‘objective-real possibility’ (Bloch, 1972: 17). Referring to Aristotle’s concept of entelechy, Bloch proceeds from the assumption that matter has an inherent teleology and treats matter as fundamentally ‘open’, so that its development is not determined and has ‘space for the new’ (p. 19). Nevertheless, he sees it as oriented towards ‘the entelechetically meant goal as it has not yet become, but as it is utopically latent’ (p. 467). Although this ontology too starts from a primordial dynamics of matter that structures human actions and social processes, Bloch reflects upon the theoretical status of the subject and explicitly highlights the importance of human agency. In Bloch’s analysis, the ‘real utopian’ tendency of matter does not unfold without any action by the subjects. It is the ‘subjective making to negate, bringing about negation’ that drives forward the ‘objective negative within the inadequate existing’ (p. 467). To sum up, the ontological versions of historical materialism that build on a theory of matter itself differ with regard to their political-ethical orientations, but none of them reflects on the problems any ontology poses for a critical theory that seeks to analyze and overcome relations of domination.

In contrast, alternative versions of historical materialism have taken the praxeological turn in the Theses on Feuerbach as a starting point. In the Theses, Marx starts with a critique of the dualism of materialism and idealism. He brings the concept of praxis into play in such a way that it is removed from the context of the philosophy of consciousness and becomes a conceptual catalyst of what he calls the ‘new’ materialism. Marx’s main charge against ‘all hitherto existing materialism’ is that it does not conceive of reality ‘as sensuous human activity, practice’ (Marx, 1976 [1845–6]: 3). This means, as Marx puts it, that this form of materialism only ‘contemplates’ social reality but cannot reconstruct it as the result of social practice. From this focus on praxis, it follows that social reality is not something given and stable but made and contingent. For Marx, the object of the ‘new’ materialism is thus the critique and transformation of bourgeois society. This understanding of materialism is principally anti-ontological. Throughout the Theses and The German Ideology, written shortly thereafter, Marx and Engels do not refer to matter itself. Instead practice, activity, production, and conditions of life are all characterized as material. Marx and Engels speak of ‘real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life’ (p. 31), and state that ‘by producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life’ (p. 31). A little later, they explain how the structure of society and the state result from the material activity of humans. These things, they claim, are

continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, however of these individuals…as they actually are; i.e. as they act, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will. (Marx and Engels, 1976 [1845–6]: 35–6)

Initially, though, we find a continuation of Marx’ praxeological materialism in the writings of first-generation critical theorists who distanced themselves from the ontological and scientistic versions of historical materialism. Particularly notable in this respect is Max Horkheimer’s essay ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’ (1933). In this text Horkheimer argues forcefully against any form of ontological materialism, and presents his alternative understanding of materialism as social theory. He argues that the structure of materialist theory differs fundamentally from that of idealism. Materialist theory does not seek to formulate supra-historical generalizations. Instead, its epistemic projects develop ‘from the tasks which at any given period are to be mastered with the help of the theory’ (Horkheimer, 1975 [1933]: 20). The decisive element is thus an interventionist understanding of theoretical practice which means that analysis, critique and a perspective of societal change are understood as co-constitutive. As Horkheimer puts it, materialist theory is ‘concerned with changing the concrete conditions under which men suffer’ (p. 32). Accordingly, he explicitly distances himself from ‘any treatment of materialism…which is interested primarily in metaphysical questions’ and which fails to recognize the interventionist character of theory. Such treatment is, as he forcefully puts it, fundamentally ‘misguided’ (p. 21). In light of the fact that human beings ‘change not only nature but themselves and all their relationships’, any form of ‘philosophical ontology and anthropology’ becomes obsolete (p. 25). Much like Marcuse and Adorno, Horkheimer insists on the importance for critical theory of conceiving of and reflecting upon its own historical situatedness, as it is meant as a disruptive theoretical intervention into concrete societal constellations of power and domination: ‘The theoretical activity of men, like the practical, is not the independent knowledge of a fixed object, but a product of ever changing reality’ (p. 28).

To sum up, it is the praxeological perspective that deconstructs ontology. It thus does not come as a surprise that Marcuse and Adorno, too, in their accounts of materialism, have highlighted the praxeological dimension in Marx. According to Adorno, it is the notion of praxis that prevents Marx from presenting materialism ‘as a kind of ontology’ (Adorno, 1974 [1963]: 256). His materialism, Adorno argues, is not geared towards ‘a total worldview’ but ‘from the start restricts itself to the explication of the forms of human sociality’ (pp. 256–7). Marcuse, in his reflections on historical materialism from 1928, interprets it as a ‘theory of social action, of the historical act’ (2005 [1928]: 1) by reading the German Ideology through the lens of Heidegger’s praxeological approach in Being and Time. In line with Heidegger, Marcuse argues that the notion of objectivity and the understanding of the world as being present-at-hand only emerge if we abstract from our practical being-in-the-world. He stresses that from the point of view of Marx’s dialectical method, both the epistemic subjects and the epistemic objects are basically historical. No epistemic position beyond the concrete historical situation can be assumed in this kind of thought, so that knowledge is necessarily always partial and contested. The praxeological perspective thus results in a version of historical materialism that builds on the connection between critical epistemology and social critique.

Although materialist feminists of the 1970s and ’80s, in Anglophone contexts, rarely referred to early critical theory, many built on the praxeological formulations of The German Ideology. This is for example the case in the work of Nancy Hartsock, who argued that the praxis of women should be placed at the center of a materialist theory of society and knowledge, that is to say especially those activities that are designated as reproductive work. When Marx and Engels say that ‘what individuals are’ depends on the ‘material conditions of their production’ (Marx and Engels, 1976 [1845–6]: 32), this also applies to women. According to Hartsock, the meaning of the category of women thus depends on the social structures of the division of labor and on the activities carried out by women in these formations. She gives this insight an epistemological turn when she states that ‘each division of labor, whether by gender or class, can be expected to have consequences for knowledge.’ (Hartsock, 1998 [1983]: 108) Without going into the details of Hartsock’s standpoint theory, it emerges that in her account, too, ‘the material’ of materialism does not refer to matter itself but to lived social realities. ⁶ In the current debate on the new materialism, though, the praxeological versions of historical materialism are almost never mentioned. However, as I will argue in the following section, they provide crucial insights that can help us to figure out more clearly the promising aspects of the new materialism.

III New alliances: Towards a critical materialism

Diana Coole is one of the few authors who attempt to reformulate some of the insights of the new materialism from the perspective of critical theory. Coole sees the new ontology of matter as constitutive of a ‘different mode of being-in-the-world’ (Coole, 2013: 462), or of a ‘new sensibility’. With reference to Marcuse’s critique of One-dimensional Man, she states that his vision of a new form of subjectivity ‘seems to have renewed resonance today. Harmonious, erotic, playful and imaginative, the new sensibility or aesthetic ethos is…an attitude of letting-be that he associates with the pacification of nature’ (p. 462). Unlike other new materialists, though, Coole argues that an ethical perspective is not sufficient on its own but needs to be supplemented by social theory and criticism. The ‘capacious historical materialism’ which she envisions addresses social and historical reality on three levels: firstly the ‘embodied quotidian’, secondly the social, economic and political structures, and thirdly the ‘the planetary eco-/bio-and geo-systems where ‘nature’ succumbs to or eludes social control’ (p. 464). Although Coole explicitly associates her work with the ontology of the new materialism, her materialism does not build on a construction of matter as a meta-subject or a pre-social dynamic. Matter, in Coole’s understanding, is rather ‘the actual, sensuous, corporeal milieu of everyday survival’ (p. 455). This articulation of matter as milieu, however, resonates with what Marx and Engels characterize in The German Ideology as ‘material conditions’ of life, that is to say the ensemble of social and natural contexts which precede the actions of individuals and which include ‘nature’ as always already modulated and modified.

As the example of Coole makes clear, the new materialism cannot be identified with its metaphysical versions. Even in the case of Barad’s ontology, which I have criticized for its cosmological narrative, some aspects can be interpreted in a praxeological perspective. The notion of phenomena which are not stable and fixed entities but result from the interplay of human and nonhuman actors could for example be understood with reference to Marx’s conception of work as a process that mediates the ‘material re-actions’ between humans and nature (Marx, 1906 [1867]: III.IV.2). Another possibility would be to reinterpret the notion of phenomena with reference to Heidegger’s concept of useful things (Zeug), according to which objects are initially present to us for everyday purposes and only appear as isolated ‘things’ as a result of abstraction from these practical concerns. ⁷ In addition, Barad’s cosmological claims about the world-making activity of matter itself stand in contrast to her much more modest claim that matter ‘is an active participant in the world’s becoming’ (Barad, 2003: 122). This does not necessarily lead to an equation of human practices with the activity of other agents. In contrast, it comes close to a position that Haraway clearly formulated in her essay on ‘Situated Knowledges’. There, Haraway argued that we should conceive of objects as agents or actors, but also take into account that actors ‘come in many wonderful forms’ (Haraway, 1988: 593). We can have what she calls ‘conversations’ with the non-human actors but cannot eliminate our specific relations towards them. The world, she reminds us, ‘neither speaks itself nor disappears in favor of a master decoder’ (p. 593).

Accordingly, Haraway has explicitly distanced herself from a strong posthumanist perspective. In her book When Species Meet she states: ‘I never wanted to be posthuman or posthumanist, any more than I wanted to be postfeminist. For one thing, urgent work still remains to be done in reference to those who must inhabit the troubled categories of women and human, properly pluralized, reformulated, and brought into constitutive intersection with other asymmetrical differences’ (Haraway, 2008: 17). The rejection of posthumanism, here again, resonates with a critical epistemology that accounts for the power relations of knowledge production and avoids any metaphysical claim. As Haraway’s interventions make clear, it is only on such grounds that the crucial insights of the material turn can be acknowledged.

Social theory has largely conceptualized the social, subjectivity and agency without taking into account the entanglements of human subjects and societies with the non-human world, living and non-living. The challenge that the new materialism poses is thus to take the critique of anthropocentrism and the turn to the materiality and the specific dynamics of the nonhuman world seriously without subscribing to ontological, scientistic and posthuman narratives. Some of the authors who have contributed to the material turn avoid the latter. This is certainly the case with Haraway, who advocates a relational approach to human and nonhuman bodies. ‘The partners’, Haraway states in When Species Meet, ‘do not precede the meeting; species of all kind, living and not, are consequent to a subject- and object-shaping dance of encounters’ (Haraway, 2008: 4). To accept that bodies are not constituted through clear and fixed boundaries but that diverse bodies, human and nonhuman, co-exist and shape each other leads to an increased awareness of the specific and concrete processes and arrangements that constitute such meetings of human beings ‘with other critters’ (p. 5). In so far as Haraway avoids the fallacies of ontology, scientism and posthumanism she contributes to an encompassing praxeological understanding of social human-nature relations. Meetings, relations and companionship can be understood as constituted through practices – not practices of rational, calculating and autonomous human beings but of situated human beings who exist by constantly changing themselves and the socionatural relations that they are situated in.

In a similar way, Stacy Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality articulates the relations of humans, non-human living beings and other forms of matter without subsuming these entities or actors under an all-encompassing process of life or matter itself. Alaimo, whose work is informed by perspectives from the environmental justice movement, explains her understanding of transcorporeality with regard to the unexpected and unwanted results of encounters of human bodies, ecological systems and agents such as toxic chemical substances. She argues that ‘the human is always enmeshed with the more-than-human-world’ (Alaimo, 2010: 2), and these enmeshments are structured by political and economic inequalities and hierarchies, including hierarchical gender relations.

Neither Alaimo nor Haraway makes any appeal to ontology, scientism or a strong posthumanism. Their objects of investigation are historically and societally specific relationships and constellations of human-nature relations, and they give prominence to the mutual interpenetration and amalgamation of human and non-human bodies. Human bodies are thus always already involved in relations with the nonhuman world, and these relations in turn are modified by a large variety of societal processes. As a consequence, the contrast between nature and culture is at most a gradual transition. Haraway uses the neologism ‘naturecultures’ in order to make the point that nature and culture cannot be separated, and draws attention to the multiplicity of human-nature relations. This understanding of nature and the body resonates with Marx and Engels’ formulations in The German Ideology where they claim that nature, including human bodily nature, is always historically mediated as it has been modified by human praxis. In addition, the attempt to include human-nature regimes that co-shape human subjectivity and society can also be traced back to the reflections about the domination of nature (Naturbeherrschung) by first-generation critical theorists. ⁸ Historical materialism, then, is not in its entirety characterized by an inclination to a forgetfulness of nature, or solely interested in ‘economic structures and exchange’ (Bennett, 2010: xvi) as authors associated with the new materialism repeatedly claim. Rather, versions of historical materialism can be distinguished precisely in respect of the ways in which they raise the question of non-human nature. Here, as in the new materialism, the main difference is between scientistic-ontological materialisms, which treat matter, nature or life itself as a supra-historical totality, and approaches that address the specific societal constellations of human-nature relations as well as the contested forms of nature knowledge.

Accordingly, a critical materialism would build political-theoretical alliances across the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ versions of materialism, taking up elements from those materialist traditions and approaches that conceive of materiality without reference to matter itself. It would combine social critical theory and critical epistemology in its attempt to analyze socio-natural constellations and to reveal possibilities of transgressing and overcoming the sedimented power relations that shape them. Such a critical turn within the recent debates about materialism would not only reconfigure the heterogeneous field of the new materialism; it would also give important impulses for critical theory which indeed to a large extent has neglected those branches that lead in the direction of a critical theory of human-nature relations.

IV Conclusion

I have argued in this article that the new materialism is a heterogeneous field in which ontological and more or less praxeological positions that do not subscribe to the expense of critical epistemology coexist. I have also argued that the related problems of ontology, epistemology and anthropology – respectively vitalism, scientism and posthumanism – have a much longer history and have already troubled the tradition of historical materialism. Drawing on the anti-ontological versions of historical materialism that take the praxeological turn of Marx’s critique of anthropology as a starting point, I have argued that the current debate about the new materialism would profit from aligning itself with these versions of historical materialism. In particular, such an alignment would make it possible to turn the new materialism into a true critical theory that reveals the interrelations between human societies and the nonhuman world by analyzing the various relations of power and domination and the contested knowledges that shape these interrelations.