Longing for agency: New materialisms’ wrestling with despair

The end of the world as we know it

Post-democracy, neoliberalism, cognitive capitalism, capitalist realism, authoritarianism, xeno-racism, neocolonialism, extractivism, precarity, algorithmic governmentality, multiple crises, depressive realism, post-feminism, sexual exceptionalism: these are only a few diagnoses in contemporary critical theorizing that echo the pop group R.E.M.’s insight uttered in the mid-1980s: ‘It’s the end of the world, as we know it.’ Yet while R.E.M. ironically added ‘And I feel fine’, the contemporary ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams, 1977) seem to release a different affective regime – even despite what has come to be known as neoliberal feel-good requirements. Over the last years, feelings such as melancholia, paranoia, despair, hopelessness and political depression have been deemed distinctive political moods, even within critical theories.

This, I argue, is the affective landscape for understanding and situating new materialist endeavours. As much as new materialist approaches have been praised and even celebrated lately, they have also evoked highly controversial reactions. In the past few years, numerous voices have critiqued the proclaimed newness and the ‘founding gestures’ (Ahmed, 2008) of new materialisms along with the ‘gesture of abandonment’ (Hinton and Liu, 2015: 128) as well as the ‘neo-metaphysical turn’ accompanying the re-emergence of new materialisms’ spotlight on ontology (Lettow, 2017: 107). Here, I take up a different perspective on new materialisms by explicitly focusing the attention on the specific conditions of their appearance. The questions I am interested in are therefore: Why a new materialism, why at this historical moment? And what makes this material turn so attractive?

I suggest that the answer lies in equally attending to the emergence of new materialisms by looking at some of their major concerns and in situating these concerns within a contemporary politics of knowledge production. I argue that new materialist approaches attempt to oppose the contemporary affective condition of political depression, despair and hopelessness by desiring and mobilizing to achieve a different political future, one that ultimately relates to care and commonality as well as to (new) modes and modalities of political agency. This is apparent in the imagining of the political in a new and especially posthumanist manner as well as in the ethical-political attitude and practice of taking into account the potential of the un/conceivable and im/possible. I elaborate this shift by taking a closer look at agency as feminist new materialisms’ ‘core question’ (Colman, 2018; cf. Coole, 2013; Coole and Frost, 2010; Meißner, 2016) and more explicitly at Jane Bennett’s and Karen Barad’s approaches. Both explicitly rethink agency in terms of posthumanist agency, albeit from different perspectives. Barad relates agency to (feminist) theories of science and physics, while Bennett comes from political philosophy, and explicitly a Spinozian tradition as well as a critical engagement with vitalism. While their insights doubtlessly provide engaged and powerful interventions within contemporary struggles for agency, I will demonstrate the risk of depoliticization inherent in their longing for something different, which can ultimately even compromise opening up possibilities for agency. However, I also argue that this is only half of the story. Based on the premise that theories are always also inventions and interventions into our historical present, as they express, reflect and produce political landscapes, moods and atmospheres, I refer to ‘older’ materialisms and show, how such a diffractive reading can help us to understand new materialisms’ longing for agency as an intervention into the contemporary crisis of imagination. To conclude, I argue for reading new materialisms’ longing for agency as a performative tactics of counter-feelings. My contribution aims to discuss new materialist concerns within the context of contemporary political and theoretical landscapes in order to better decipher the new materialist signals of our times, but also to critically push further the possibilities for political agency within feminist theory, at times even against all odds.

Longing for a different future

Looking at recent debates in critical theory one might easily get the impression of witnessing not only an economic, political, ecological and care crisis, but it seems that critical theory has also been in crisis for quite some time now. At least since the end of the so-called real existing socialism, there are numerous voices in contemporary critical theory that complain about the lack and loss of political visions for emancipatory transformation. Instead, critical theories seem to echo a ‘pervasive … political despair – that is, feelings of political inefficacy and hopelessness, the sense that nothing will ever change, no matter what some imagined collective “we” does to try to bring change’ (Gould, 2012: 95). Thus, the capacity of critical social and political theory to bring about transformative political action and its overall ability to come up with compelling political alternatives are questioned more and more (cf. Gatens, 2014; Harvey, 2000).

Following the insights of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003 [1997]: 125), first appearing in the late 1990s, this lack of imagination is partly due to what she has called the ‘methodological centrality’ of a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ within US critical theories, the latter being an expression she borrows from Paul Ricœur. For Sedgwick (2003: 125), this means ‘the mandatory injunction’ of paranoid attitudes and methodologies that she identifies in Marxism, psychoanalysis and poststructuralism alike, beautifully and provocatively worded in her title ‘Paranoid reading and reparative reading, or, you’re so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you’. Paranoid reading is limited to a critique of power and domination that relies on ‘exposure’ and ‘unveiling hidden’ truths (Sedgwick, 2003: 138–139) and thus on negative criticism. This prevailing and exclusive paranoia is not only problematic because it produces absolute truth claims. In the end, it can only reveal what has already been assumed and suspected beforehand and in doing so it also rejects any positive affects. However, for emancipatory change, Sedgwick argues, this paranoid attitude should be accompanied by a reparative reading, since the latter leaves space for the unknown and for surprise.

In a similar vein, some years later Wendy Brown (1999) has problematized a specific affective atmosphere that haunts critical theories and makes them reluctant to propose any vision of political transformation. Brown refers to Walter Benjamin and to Sigmund Freud in order to criticize a left backward-looking melancholy in view of the collapse of real socialism and the inheritance of Marxism. This specific left melancholy comprises a narcissistic desire for ‘past political attachments’, making ‘any contemporary investment in political mobilization, alliance, or transformation’ impossible (Brown, 1999: 20). Instead of searching for political possibilities, a passivizing mourning over the loss of past political promises and visions takes over. An ‘almost fairy-tale like belief’, as David Harvey (2000: 11) would frame it, ‘of what once was’ (Brown, 1999: 23) is put in place, particularly blaming identity politics and poststructuralism, which – ‘together or separately’ – are ‘held responsible for the weak, fragmented, and disoriented character of the contemporary Left’ (Brown, 1999: 23). For Brown, however, this melancholy exposes a self-pitying left that ‘is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure’ (Brown, 1999: 26). While Sedgwick identifies paranoia as the privileged and passivizing affective mode of criticism, for Brown it is left melancholy that stands in the way of a ‘critical and visionary spirit’ (Brown, 1999: 26).

Brown’s insights have proven to be quite contagious. Some years later Mark Fisher identifies a ‘hauntological melancholia’ (Fisher, 2014: 23) in the face of a ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher, 2009: 23) as the dominant political mood. Capitalist realism implies a sort of political depression, the feeling ‘that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (Fisher, 2009: 2). While Brown calls for open challenges to the crisis of left politics and theory – ‘resisting left melancholy’ (Brown, 1999: 19) – Fisher’s understanding of hauntological melancholia entails a critique of backward looking, while simultaneously sympathizing with a politics of melancholy (Spitaler, 2018): ‘Of course, one cannot simply wish back the future. But one can point out that we have lost a future. . . . The melancholy with which I look at this development is a form of refusal to resign myself to it – a melancholic attachment to longing for another future’ (Fisher, 2015, author’s translation). Political melancholy is both a valorization of the loss of political agency and a vehicle for countering this political atmosphere.

Although the diagnoses, critiques and demands of Sedgwick, Brown and Fisher appear to differ, they share one striking commonality: their criticism of the lack of political visions and notions of emancipation and transformation in contemporary critical theories, which are expressed through affective attitudes such as (political and theoretical) paranoia, melancholia, or depression. Recently, Jonathan Dean (2015: 234) has similarly noted: ‘Gloom, despair and melancholia’ have become ‘the default affective settings for much of the Anglo-American left in recent decades.’

I do not seek to neglect the political potential of feeling bad, of melancholy and hopelessness as bringing about change, or to deny that feelings are, indeed, political. On the contrary, having bad, negative or ugly feelings is not necessarily politically harmful, but can also be a transformative and mobilizing force, as queer, feminist and postcolonial scholars have convincingly argued (cf. Ahmed, 2004, 2010; Cvetkovich, 2012; hooks, 1990; Love, 2007; Ngai, 2005). Yet, I understand Brown’s, Fisher’s and Sedgwick’s insights as a critique of a particular feeling script where despair, melancholy and paranoia do not hint at rebuilding the foundation for collective transformative politics but instead nurture or even fetishize, in Brown’s terms, narcissism, cynicism, self-pity and self-righteousness. It is a critique of theorizing that describes and produces atmospheres which confine politics to the ‘end of the world as we know it’, instead of thinking them anew. I argue that such a critique is all the more important since theories are not only descriptions, but also expressions, reflections and modes of working through the historical present. In this sense, the absence of political visions in critical theories expresses both a feeling of powerlessness and a ‘crisis of imagination’ (Vrasti, 2016: 249). After all, political imagination and political imaginaries, which are also developed in critical theories, constitute crucial material-affective forces that might make another politics possible (Bargetz, 2016: 201).

Lately, however, there has been an increase in resistance to this sentimental scripting of hopelessness as conveyed through political melancholy, depression, or paranoia, leading some critics to even assume that the era of ‘left melancholia is perhaps over’ (Dean, 2015: 234). In the early 2000s, JK Gibson-Graham (2006: 6) already elaborated different economic futures in order to counter ‘the theoretical closure of paranoia, the backward-looking political certainty of melancholia and the moralistic skepticism toward power’. More recently, Paul Mason (2015) identified a ‘moment of possibility’ that might indicate the end of neoliberalism and the coming of postcapitalism, and authors such as Jodi Dean (2012) or Michael Hardt (2010) express hope and their desire for a different future by reconsidering and rethinking communism. Similarly, approaches concerned with care, relationality, vulnerability and new economies of affect and solidarity as well as approaches to what some have dubbed a ‘politics of the commons’ (e.g. Federici, 2010; Hardt and Negri, 2009; Linebaugh, 2008; Midnight Notes Collective, 2009) ¹ are not only concerned with the contemporary political moment but also draw upon theoretical lessons from the past for transformation and emancipation.

In addition to these postcapitalist, post-operaist (e.g. Hardt and Negri, 2000, 2004, 2009) and care approaches, along with (queer-feminist) approaches after the affective (Clough and Halley, 2007) and/or reparative turn (Wiegman, 2014), I argue that new materialisms need to be included in this list of diverse endeavours. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010: 8) point out in their introduction to the volume New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics: ‘[T]he prevailing ethos of new materialist ontology’ is ‘more positive and constructive than critical or negative’. It is about engagement, as Myra J Hird (2009: 343) puts it. And Kathrin Thiele’s (2014: 202) posthumanist vision entails the idea of living in a ‘world of difference(s), a world in/as ongoing differentiation, in such ways that the outcome is not ever more separation and antagonism, exclusion and the fear of others, but so that new senses of commonality are envisioned’. In the following, I elaborate new materialists’ assessment by taking a closer look at some of their concerns with agency.

Material agency

‘Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter’ (Barad, 1996: 801). This telling and often quoted assessment Karen Barad first presented in the mid-1990s and returned to in her 2007 book Meeting the Universe Halfway. As is well known, Barad is not the sole critic of a representationalist, discursive and linguistic concept of materiality. In recent years, feminist and anti-racist scholarship has been assessed as overtly deconstructivist and anti-biological. New materialists are pinpointing these deficiencies that they hope to remedy through re-establishing materiality (e.g. Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Saldanha, 2006; Wilson, 1998). Claiming to conceive of materialities beyond human boundaries, new materialisms succeed in expanding the humanities and social sciences by including various materialities in their research and analyses – for instance, animals, data, things, nature, atoms, toxins, psychopharmaceuticals, electricity, garbage, works of art, bacteria, artificial intelligence, spirituality, drugs, weather phenomena, stem cells, metals, ultrasounds and nanotechnologies, just to name but a few. However, more than the mere expansion of scientific objects is at stake. New materialists do not consider materialities to be (humanly) manageable objects, but rather recognize the power of the materialities themselves. ‘Why’, Barad (2007: 132) wonders, ‘are language and culture granted their own agency and historicity, while matter is figured as passive and immutable or at best inherits a potential for change derivatively from language and culture?’ From a new materialist perspective matter is not a given but ‘matter becomes’ (Coole and Frost, 2010: 10) – for instance within concepts such as ‘thingpower’ (Bennett, 2010: xvi) or ‘agentic capacities’ (Coole, 2013). Matter and materiality refer to activity and mobility as well as to obstinacy, agency and continuous and dynamic change. Matter is not passive, opaque or unchangeable. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010: 10) emphasize, matter is ‘indeterminate, constantly forming and reforming in unexpected ways’; it is ‘an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable’.

Within new materialisms, we can neither identify a paranoid narrowing towards power and domination, nor a backward-looking longing for emancipation. Rather, by rethinking materiality these approaches articulate a gesture which – optimistically directed towards the future – expresses the search for myriad possibilities and for new political forces. Rethinking matter also materializes within a language of hope and potentiality. As Bennett suggests, new materialisms point to a world which is ‘not predetermined but open, a land of opportunity for creativity, surprise, and choice’ (2010: 90). In a similar vein, Barad (2007: 170) notes that ‘[m]atter’s dynamism is inexhaustible, exuberant and prolific’. Matter is a force that should not be underestimated, leading Barad to euphorically claim: ‘The world’s effervescence, its exuberant creativeness can never be contained or suspended’ (Barad, 2007: 177) – because there is always ‘a sense in which “the world kicks back” ’ (Barad, 1998: 112).

In order to grasp the vitality, self-sufficiency and self-importance of matter and materiality, Bennett speaks of ‘vibrant matter’. She designs her ‘positive ontology’ of agency, activity and freedom as a counter-project to anthropocentrism’s ‘relentless approach toward demystification’ (Bennett, 2010: x), which in her view exhibits a lack of positive alternatives. While she considers demystifying practices doubtlessly as an important democratic tool, Bennett questions the political efficacy of demystification because it does not necessarily create ‘moral outrage’, and even if it does, it does not necessarily ‘spark ameliorative action’ (Bennett, 2010: xv). In this vein, her critique of demystification – which Bennett calls the ‘blame game’ (Bennett, 2010: 37) – echoes Sedgwick’s objection to paranoid reading. Moreover, she argues that demystification fosters human narcissism. While Brown criticizes a narcissistic attitude towards past political attachments, Bennett’s critique of narcissism corresponds to the overemphasis of and overreliance on human agency and to the reduction of agency to an outcome of the human will (Bennett, 2010: xvi). ² Bennett turns our attention instead to the importance of nonhuman agency and develops an alternative understanding of agency. Rather than theorizing agency as a capacity located within the human body, she expands the notion by speaking of ‘distributed agency’ (Bennett 2010: 38) or ‘confederate agency’ (Bennett, 2010: 37) between human and nonhuman elements or an ‘agency of assemblages’, following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Bennett, 2010: 20). As an example she refers to the 2003 North American blackout, where different elements – social, linguistic, legal, nonhuman – act together in unexpected ways. With her emphasis on distributed agency Bennett also argues against an all too easy linear understanding of cause and effect. By drawing on Hannah Arendt’s distinction between origins and causes (Bennett, 2010: 33), she upholds the assumption of complex, mobile, multilayered and unavailable origins as opposed to singular, stable and masterful causes. She elucidates this view in the case of the blackout where she anticipates the objection that her understanding of material agency would eventually lead to foregoing responsibility. Bennett contests this critique by arguing that confederate agency enables a multiplicity of harmful origins to be identified without reducing them to simple causes. Only such a vision of non-determinist, non-intentionalist causality would allow for a more comprehensive understanding of socio-material connectivities and thus lead to a more appropriate notion of agency.

Karen Barad’s writings are about the ‘possibilities of making a better world … a world that is more livable, not for some, but for the entangled wellbeing of all’ (2011: 8). In order to explore these possibilities, Barad proposes a materially informed reformulation of performativity – posthumanist performativity – that ultimately also challenges the notion of agency. While Barad acknowledges Judith Butler’s notion of performativity as helpful for moving beyond the dichotomy of structure and agency, she critiques her humanist and discursive concept of materiality. In her view, Butler correctly shows that matter has a history and is not unchangeable, yet she reduces this historicity to the ‘agency of language or culture’ while ignoring ‘matter’s dynamism’ (Barad, 2007: 64). Barad suggests instead a reciprocal intra-activity of discourse and matter, defining intra-activity as the ‘entangled intra-relating’ (Barad, 2007: ix), as a constant becoming, a dynamic process. In contrast to the notion of interaction, where separate individual agencies are supposed to interact, the notion of intra-action should emphasize that these ‘distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action’ (Barad, 2007: ix). Intra-action, therefore, is Barad’s proposal for reconceptualizing causality in a not-deterministic manner. This understanding of intra-action not only influences her understanding of matter as a ‘substance in its intra-active becoming’ (Barad, 2007: 336). It also provides the key premise for Barad’s notion of posthumanist agency. Because agency resides in intra-activity: ‘Agency is “doing” or “being” in its intra-activity’ (Barad, 2007: 178). Similar to Bennett, Barad does not conceive of agency as a capacity inherent in someone or something, but as a multiplicity of possibilities within a dynamic process. Moreover, these intra-actions always entail ‘particular exclusions’ (Barad, 2007: 177), a circumstance which has a double effect: the fact that something is always excluded renders absolute determinism impossible; simultaneously it makes visible that something else might be possible. An exclusion articulates a boundary and, at the same time, points beyond this boundary. Or, as Barad (2007: 182), notes, agency ‘is the space of possibilities opened up by the indeterminacies entailed in exclusions’. For Barad, this understanding has political and ethical consequences because it leaves open the horizon for change.

In conclusion, how can new materialisms oppose the contemporary affective condition that has been identified in different ways by Brown, Fisher and Sedgwick? Criticizing teleology, determinism and simple causal relations, Barad’s and Bennett’s new materialisms propose a posthumanist notion of agency by referring to a complex conception of socio-material entanglements. Agency is ‘distributed across a mosaic’ (Bennett, 2010: 38), it is an ‘ongoing reconfiguring of the world’ (Barad, 2007: 141), and, consequently, it implies a multiplicity of possibilities for shaping the future. Agency is not something that something or someone has. Rather, agency is something that happens. From such a perspective, it might best be framed as post-sovereign agency. Since matter is conceived of as mobile and powerful, socio-material relations can never be fully determined, and, therefore, comprehended and organized. It is the un/ruliness of materiality that the new materialist emphasis on posthumanist agency seeks to reveal – one that harbours indeterminacy, excess and obstinacy. In this vein, materialities embody moments of surprise and of the unforeseen.

Material agency and the impasse of material promises

In the following I will discuss that the new materialist longing for agency does not only gauge the possibilities of the im/possible or express a way out of hopelessness, but may also fuel the risk of depoliticization. In the preface to the journal Women: A Cultural Review’s special issue on Feminist Matters: The Politics of New Materialism, Peta Hinton and Iris van der Tuin emphasize the concept of immanent power as the basis of new materialist approaches, a conceptualization of power which moves beyond the power/resistance dichotomy: ‘Rethinking materiality’s dynamism – materiality as force – directly involves the way we think its politics. Riding the wave of new materialisms, “force” no longer translates into the co-constitutive yet binary interplay of power (normative ideology), on the one hand, and resistance, on the other. Here, force is the impetus immanent to this entire constituency … which generates the metamorphoses in/of the dialectic’ (Hinton and Van der Tuin, 2014: 1–2). Understanding power in this way shows that the ‘innovative, immanent or monist gesture of feminist new materialism’ does not ‘entail a happy-go-lucky flat, or flattening, ontology’ but rather a ‘careful search for the condition of possibility of possibility’ (Hinton and Van der Tuin, 2014: 6).

And yet emphasizing posthumanist agency not only serves an immanent understanding of power; it also risks pushing relations of power and domination to the onto-epistemological margins of the sensible and sayable. Barad’s emphasis on the inexhaustible and exuberant creativity and dynamics of matter as well as Bennett’s model of distributed agency rework an understanding of agency. However, where and how such creativity can ultimately be expressed politically, and how different entanglements make the world in different ways, remains widely un- or undertheorized. Placing the emphasis on creativity, dynamism and excess disregards how power relations, domination and inequalities are inscribed within these assemblages as well as the effects of power asymmetries for (posthumanist) agency. Although Bennett (2010: 38) emphasizes with good reason the impossibility of ‘assigning singular blame’, in terms of political agency, not all elements of an assemblage or agencies of an intra-action can make something matter equally. Although these differences can never be fully grasped, they should be acknowledged and theorized in order to better understand how power operates as a political and social force. This is all the more important since the power of posthumanist agency is linked to questions of responsibility and accountability. It almost appears that unfolding a horizontal and immanent understanding of power that particularly highlights the force of materiality while ignoring hierarchies and asymmetries within assemblages or intra-actions, not only works in favour of vertical power relations, but ultimately renders considerations of power relations obsolete by subordinating them to thinking in terms of potentialities.

The problematic that new materialisms articulate a longing for agency and another future, while simultaneously blocking its very possibility, also becomes apparent when the possibilities for creativity, surprise and change are grounded in the mere matter of materiality. Such an understanding ultimately obstructs every form of (political) agency in the sense that history is also, but not only, made by human beings. Making matter the evidence for the un/conceivable deprives socio-material relations of the political – if we consider the political as space of political struggles and negotiations – and, ultimately, negates the historical nature of these entanglements. This not only makes the idea of political responsibility and agency difficult and maybe even obsolete. Contrary to its own aspirations, materiality also runs the risk of becoming a new fetish by reducing the hope for (posthumanist) agency to a metaphysical claim (cf. Ahmed, 2008; Lettow, 2014). Such a transhistorical material force counters any account of agency and implies that institutionalized forms of power and domination as well as the complexity of social relations are ignored.

Finally, a radical posthumanism falls short with regard to agency since it raises the question of the ‘knowing subject’ (Meißner, 2016: 49) or, more precisely, the longing subject. If my argument is persuasive that new materialisms express and perform a longing for agency and a different future, then these approaches always entail deeply human aspirations. Indeed, although agency, as new materialisms emphatically show, is not restricted to human beings but also manifests itself within the force of matter and materialities, the longing, the hope and the imaginary ultimately remain tied to human beings and their everyday and lived experiences. Against this backdrop, a radical new materialist critique of social constructivist (feminist, anti-racist) knowledge production also remains unsustainable when it comes to taking its own concerns seriously, including understanding theories and knowledge production as affective material practices and as viable ways to help imagine the present and future differently.

Opposing the crisis of imagination

It is precisely this reference to the power of critical knowledge production that I would like to further evaluate. Taking the theoretical and political shortcomings into account, one might ultimately wonder about new materialisms’ capacities for a (re)new(ed) path towards political agency and their potential to counter political despair, depression and melancholy. In order to further assess this question, in the following I propose reading new materialisms’ insights through the lens of some ‘older’ materialist theories. Following Stuart Hall (1992: 286), I consider theory ‘a set of contested, localized, conjunctural knowledges’, a ‘practice which always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference, in which it would have some effect’. Critical theory, then, is more than a mere expression of academic professionalization and profiling inside the ‘ivory tower’. As ‘performative visualization’s’ critical theories are part of the political and might help ‘imagining the impossible’ (Meißner, 2015: 200, author’s translation). And this does not mean outlining specific policies or developing blueprints for emancipatory political practices. Rather, it is a horizon as well as a creative space for invention and intervention. Understanding new materialisms in this way contributes to building another future. This would suggest that the longing for agency within new materialisms is not only apparent in their concepts but also in the politics of theory itself.

It is also in this sense that new materialisms may express an appeal for political accountability. Speaking of critical theory as invention and intervention not only indicates, as Mona Singer (2005: 211) suggests, that ‘the world as we know it could look different, but that we also have to take responsibility for how it looks’ – precisely ‘because it could look different’. Like other critical theories, new materialisms display, in Marx’s words, ‘the self-clarification … to be gained by the present time of its struggles and desires’ (Marx, 1974 [1844]: 346, author’s translation): they embody an insurgent and obstinate reaction to a growing melancholy, paranoia and depression, a struggle for imagination and the im/possible, as well as a longing for and seeking out of a different present and future. Like other theories, new materialisms are not abstract scientific instruments that objectively grasp and determine socio-material conditions, but they have powerful effects. They frame perceptions and shape perspectives and thus they can impede, confuse, disguise and conceal, just as they can also facilitate, transport and produce (Bargetz, 2016: 189).

New materialisms are thus both a political invention and intervention regarding the prevailing moods and atmospheres of despair and lack of alternatives. By refusing a backward-looking melancholy as much as an exclusive mode of paranoia they move beyond negative criticism and articulate dissent. In doing so, they generate thought and create spaces of possibility and thus intervene in the contemporary ‘crisis of imagination’ (Vrasti, 2016). Reworking the imaginary in this way can bring forward the possibilities of agency, because it affectively pushes a longing for change and helps maintain an openness or might even initiate a political horizon of possibility.

Doesn’t this entail reducing the meaning of transformation to the power of imagination? Despite the performative power of the imaginary, it still is a question of how these imaginations are materialized within concrete practices and structures. Moreover, the power of imagination should not be reduced to thinking the im/possible. Rather, longing for and anticipating an elsewhere and otherwise are also signs of dissatisfaction with the historical present and thus critiques of the here and now. Understanding agency in this sense implies both a political vision and a critique of prevailing conditions and structural constraints. Moreover, it suggests an understanding of critique, which always interrogates the conditions of possibility of the political. This understanding requires to move beyond a merely reparative or optimistic view and takes the ambivalences of political agency into account. This is the only way a politics of imagination might avoid such ‘deceptive hope’, which, as Hanna Meißner (2015: 209) cautions, would (over-)emphasize the spontaneous coming into being of a better world, because it risks disregarding that the historical present is also structured in very specific ways. In this vein, I would suggest recalling Antonio Gramsci’s (1996: 28 §11, 2232) thought-provoking appeal to the ‘pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will’ or Cornel West’s (2008: 216) insight that ‘hope is inseparable from despair’. Despite the ‘affective appeal’ (Love, 2010: 238) of the turn to reparation, new materialisms’ optimistic theoretical endeavour should not lead us to turn away from critique, but should entail both moments of affirmation and moments of dissonance.

Performative tactics of counter-feelings

By articulating longing, hope and fantasies, new materialisms indicate the need for a new or renewed understanding of political imaginaries and agency. For today, inventing (western modern) democracy is not the primary concern, but rather other questions tend to prevail, like, for instance: How to deal with the fact that the western modern struggle for democracy and emancipation has provoked the projected end of the world in all its brutality? How should a (radically renewed) emancipative and democratic longing be kept open, while at the same time suspending the ties to those modes of the political that do not work?

With their optimistic search for agency and the desire for a better world for all and everything, new materialisms hit the nerve of the times that Brown, Fisher and Sedgwick address. But rather than evoking political melancholy and/or paranoia, they resist attachments to past political and theoretical analyses and strive to invent and imagine new and different political horizons. In doing so, new materialisms attempt to counter and rework widespread feelings of powerlessness, depression and despair through developing a politics that call for a performative tactics of counter-feelings. They produce a space of counter-manifestation, and thus express an emphatic and optimistic longing and search for a new or renewed politics and agency. They signal ‘wrestling with despair’ (West, 2008: 216), a despair that is widely felt within the political and theoretical present.

In this vein, new materialisms risk being seen as ‘naïve’ or ‘complaisant’ for theorizing ‘out of anything but a paranoid critical stance’ (Sedgwick, 2003: 126). Despite the theoretical and political shortcomings of new materialisms, they are by no means simply too negligent or even naïve. This becomes all too clear with regard to current (right-wing) tendencies: here the ‘end of the world’ does not so much generate a longing for agency, care and commonality, but a longing for authoritarian politics and political leadership. It is in this sense that critical theories might offer ways to ‘demand the impossible’ (Butler, 2011) and thus to invent new politics of hopefulness.