Since Diana Coole and I first labored over how to characterize an emerging
mode of analysis, research in the new materialisms has undergone explosive
growth. We hoped for but certainly did not anticipate the breadth and vigor
of scholarship bringing substances, biological processes, artifacts, and material
environments into view as not just effects but also agents of stabilization and
change in the worlds in which we live.
What is distinctive in new materialist approaches is the inclusion in research
of materiality in its vibrancy, effectivity, affectivity, and obduracy. Scholars who
thus work to bring matters and materialities into the foreground do not ignore
the patterns of signification and representation that galvanize language, culture,
and politics. Rather, they explore how the material fleshiness of bodies and the
materiality of objects and environments constitute the ground, the matrix, and
the co-constituent agents of the discourses and symbolic systems that organize
and give meaning to our lives.
New materialist scholars explore how, for instance, the responsiveness and
plasticity of biological processes contributes to the making of acculturated subjectivity. They consider how things, big and small, invite or compel living beings
and social and political institutions to shift or adapt how things go. And they
investigate the ecological interdependencies that condition humans, nonhuman
creatures, and environments in their varied persistence and decay. To my mind,
new materialism as an approach to research is best conceived not a displacement
of humans so much as their re-situation in the multiscalar material and temporal conditions of their existence. The very best work undertakes analysis of
material, cultural, and linguistic processes together, exploring the imbrication
and mutual constitution of signifying systems, embodied subjectivities, and the
societies and landscapes of cultural and political economies.