Postscript

In recent years, the direct influence of the more extreme versions of post-structuralist and post-modernist scepticism has declined, but their legacy in the form of the research focus on language and culture and the popularity of ‘constructionist’ approaches to social problems remains strong.

In the period since 2010 there have been significant shifts in self-consciously ‘avant garde’ approaches in social theory. Terms such as ‘post-humanism, ‘transhumanism’, and ‘new materialism’ or ‘vibrant materialism’ are variously proclaimed as replacements for outdated ‘modernism’ or ‘humanism’ (though the ‘old materialism’ is oddly rarely mentioned). Often the new is proclaimed with high metaphorical excess and little dependence on either evidence or familiarity with earlier travellers in the same territory. It is beyond the scope of this book to adequately address this new literature, but a few brief comments may indicate some possible terms of debate. The literatures taking us beyond humanism claim to identify or foretell the erasure of the boundaries both between the human and the animal and between the human and the artefact. On the ‘boundaries’ between humans and (other) animals, a history of categorial opposition between the human and the animal, ontologically and morally is rightly rejected (see the brilliant, and much earlier work of the late Mary Midgley (1979)), but to efface the boundaries between species is not a necessary corollary of that move.

One of the most interesting and influential voices among the ‘new materialists’ is the political philosopher Jane Bennett (2005, 2010). Her aim is to displace a certain paradigm of distinctively human agency from our understanding of our place in the world. She challenges what she sees as the ‘human exceptionalism' of social science, in favour of a ‘new' materialist ontology which recognizes the ‘agency' of the elements and combinations of beings, processes, substances, etc., which coexist with us and shape outcomes in ways which exceed our comprehension. Her motivation in this is partly political. Bennett's emphasis on the vitality and agency of the material world is intended to overcome images of nature as ‘dead' and as mere instrument for human purposes, believing that such images feed ‘human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption' (2010: ix).

Bennett's aspiration to move beyond ways of thinking which fail to recognize the causally important role of artefacts and natural processes in enabling, shaping and even limiting social life, and her wish to challenge ‘human hubris' is very welcome. However, she seems unaware of predecessors in this, some of them also claiming their ‘materialism' but meaning something different by it. More importantly, the alternative to ‘human exceptionalism' she advocates is problematic in several ways. One obvious problem, as pointed out by Braun (2011) and others, is that to metaphorically extend the already problematic notion of agency to the rest of nature takes us away from the more specific investigation of kinds and modes of interaction in the world. Bennett herself is quite ready to refer to her approach as both an act of faith and as a metaphysics, which invites back forms of vitalism and anthropomorphism long dispensed with in the natural sciences. She draws on an astonishingly wide range of philosophical sources for her advocacy, from Spinoza, Arendt and Merleau-Ponty to Latour and Deleuze. Perhaps her main debt is to the last-mentioned, as she makes most use of his term ‘assemblage', arguing for a view of the world in which all activity is dispersed through ontologically diverse, contingent and ever-changing associations. The idea is usually introduced by providing lists of the different sorts of things (etc.) that might be combined together: ‘An assemblage, finally, is made up of many types of actants: humans and non-humans; animals, vegetables and minerals; nature, culture and technology' (Bennett 2005: 445).

This is not so much mistaken as, rather, too obvious to require the invention of a new form of materialism. Arguably, however, the refusal to see in any of the complexity and bewildering mobility of the world any anchors on which to ground a conceptual grasp or a disciplinary matrix leaves us in a worse place than the one from which Bennett begins. If we seek to challenge the ‘human hubris' and its devastating consequences, then perhaps we might need some conceptual purchase on the diverse ways in which human social practices interact with their naturally given contexts and conditions, and some way of framing strategic alternatives. Instead, however, what we are offered is an attempt to ‘unsettle our inherited concepts, including cause, time, culture, nature, event, life, kinship - and also responsibility' (Bennett 2005: 452). Bennett's ‘new' materialism comes close to giving up on the knowability of the world, an objection levelled at post­structuralism by Ian Craib in his original contribution to this chapter. Abrahamson et al. (2015) provide a more nuanced and also materialist critical discussion of Bennett's treatment of one of her key case studies.