Literature and Materialisms

Frederic Neyrat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317198451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Literature and Materialisms sheds light on the current new wave of materialisms and assesses the impact on literary theory and criticism. It maps the similarities and differences between speculative realism, object-oriented philosophy, and vitalism. A genealogy of materialisms, vitalisms, empiricisms, and realist approaches - from Heraclitus to Badiou, including Lucretius, Spinoza, Marx, Althusser, Barad, Spivak, Deleuze, Bennett, Harman, and other contemporary thinkers - puts these new trends into perspective.

This book investigates the relations between literature – from Marquis de Sade to objectivist poetry - and materialism and analyses the material aspects of literature, its structure and texture, its commodification and its capacity to resist market imperatives. It explores how literary style might be understood as a mediation between the 'immaterial' and the concrete features of a text.

This volume provides students and academics with an accessible overview of the study of literature and materialism.

1 Materialism and belief

On religion and politics

War on beliefs

As I said in the introduction, Literature and Materialisms strives to rehabilitate objects, things, materials, that is to say the environment: What surrounds us and also what is in us, the external environment composed of animals, plants, oceans, the atmosphere, and also the internal environment that constitutes our body, the more than thirty trillion bacteria that each of us contains.¹ Our environment is material and our mind does not exist without a body: An emancipated mind – remember what I explained in the last section of the introduction of my book – is not a mind severed from the universe. As 20^th century north-American objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky wrote:

Thought is weightless but is stopped by a bullet, what?²

Indeed, what an unpleasant surprise for those who tend to forget that they live in a material world and that they cannot think any longer if the material environment of their thought, that is to say their brain, is irremediably damaged. There is the lesson: We, human beings, are creatures gifted at thinking, we can use our reason and our imagination; but we exist amongst “anonymous materials” (Negarestani), that is to say, a mix of matter and forces. Is it not a perfect way to approach materialism? Materialist would be the one who pays attention to the materiality of the world, to matter, and materials. Materialist would be those who are aware of their environment.

Yet the definitions I just gave of what a materialist is are insufficient: To take the materiality of the world into consideration is necessary, but not sufficient to guarantee a materialist position. Before being able to grasp the materiality of the world, one needs to understands what prevented human beings for centuries, if not millennia, from acknowledging this materiality – that is the first and necessary step toward a materialist position. Thus, let us consider the case of a thinker who pays attention to “anonymous materials,” as a good materialist should do, but who believes that these materials attest to the presence of God or of spiritual forces. We see the problem: One thing is to think the materiality of the world; another is to believe in objects, life, matter, or whatever. For example, one can believe that things, objects, and subjects, are on the same footing, as object-oriented thinkers (a sub-category of the speculative thinkers group that I will explore in chapter 5) argue. Or one can also believe that objects and matter have their own agency and that everything is alive, as some “vitalist” thinkers (a group we will encounter in chapter 4) claim by extending the concept of life to the universe. At last, one can believe that everything is material, even thoughts, and feelings. All these beliefs end up concealing the materiality of the world. Thus, if paying attention to concrete environments and to anonymous forces is necessary, but not sufficient to be a real materialist thinker, what is the core, the essence of a materialist position? This is my hypothesis: First and foremost, a materialist is one who can suspend her or his belief.

Without such suspension of belief, a materialist thinker cannot do what she must do: Show, prove, demonstrate. A true materialist has to show in which sense and to which extent the world is material and not only to declare it. That is why materialism cannot exist without the help of science, be it economics, physics, literary criticism, or political science. Otherwise nothing will distinguish the materialist thinker from her sworn enemy: The spiritualist thinker and his faith in what-we-cannot-see-but-that-certainly-exists-hidden-somewhere-sorry-if-I-do-not-know-exactly-where. Indeed, materialism is not only an idea concerning the materiality of things, it is also and maybe first a contesting position. There has been no materialism throughout history without a bloody theoretical war – and some cadavers on the side of the road, as I will explain at the end of this chapter. To argue that everything is material is not only to give a point of view, it is to contest the opposite position, the spiritualist one that we can phrase this way: “Of course, there is an objective and concrete reality, material things, oil, drilling platforms or whatever, no big deal; but there is also another world, an outer-world made of spirits, divine entities, or pure Ideas. This outer-world exists, no doubt, even if we cannot show it, even though we cannot rationally understand it.” This is this outer-world that materialism needs to contest. When a materialist says that everything is material without exception, the “without exception” is the mark of materialism’s enemy, the trace of the refutation of this half-thinker who believes in the existence of an exception, be it spiritual or divine.

So, now, if someone tells you: “I’m a materialist, I pay attention to objects, things, and materials” just reply: “Are you sure that you really are a materialist? Is it your belief, or are you really able to shout: ‘War on beliefs!’” That is the lesson of this section: It is not enough to say that we are materialist, because materialism is an experience of thought that requires to challenge one’s own beliefs. All of them. Even if it is painful.

God, or Nature

The exception that any spiritualist or any idealist wants to protect against the corrosive attack of materialism has a proper name, a name that traversed History and survived: God. From its origin, the materialist tradition has contested this existence, or at least has tried to deeply modify the way we consider God.

Let us begin with the thinkers who are supposed to be the first materialist ones: Democritus (5^th–4^th century bc), Epicurus (4^th–3^th century bc), and the so-called ancient Greek “atomists.” For these Greek philosophers, everything – that is the important point – is only composed of atoms (that is to say, literally, “uncuttables” or indivisible parts) and void. Do not ask for a spiritual exception, an immaterial surplus, do not even think about it. As Epicurus argues, “those who say that the soul is incorporeal are talking idly,”³ because the soul is as material as any other entity in the world. That said, Epicurus does not exactly affirm that the gods do not exist, it is subtler, he affirms they are not what we believe they are – hence his materialism. For Epicurus, the only thing we can say about the gods is that they are “immortal” and “blessed.” If you think that bad things happen to bad people and good things to good people because of the gods, you are sadly wrong.⁴ The gods exist, Epicurus maintains, but they really do not care about us. They are perfect, and happy, in their own world, out there, and that is enough for them to be like that. Frankly, why would they be interested in what human beings do, or do not do? “Deriv[ing] every divine principle out of the Universe,” at least out of the human world, Epicurus opens the path to a sober study of nature, a study devoid of the bulky bodies of the gods and their myths.

From this study, human beings should be able to shape the best possible way of life and to get happiness.⁵ Make no mistake about it: Epicureanism is not hedonism, that is to say the pursuit of the maximum of pleasure. Epicureanism is the attempt to find the optimum of pleasure, that is to say the limit (ancient Greeks were obsessed with limits and their frightening transgressions) beyond which pain, or worst (death), will necessarily occur. Let us think about drugs: They can provide pleasure, a maximum of pleasure; but they also lead to lack, dependency, self-destruction, and premature death. Thanks to the study of nature – medicine, or any practical knowledge – one can learn how to get ataraxia, a word meaning perfect tranquility of the soul, a state of mind in which the Sage, because she is not overwhelmed by needs, can enjoy everything. Thanks to this materialist ethics, everything can become a source of happiness: A glass of water can become a subtle field of experiences that a gluttonous, hedonistic person would be unable to access. Then, what about death? Is not death what prevents us from being happy? Not at all: When we are dead, we do not feel anything. Thus, Epicurus argues, we need to be

accustomed that death is nothing to us. For all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation. And therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because it adds to it an infinite span of time, but because it takes away the craving for immortality.⁶

In saying that the most important thing is not first to deny the existence of the gods, but to get rid of our beliefs and to produce “an investigation in nature”, Epicurus demonstrates that materialism is before anything, and maybe only, a method (20–21). A method to think, to understand, and more specifically to understand what we refuse to understand: When gods are everywhere and are supposed to be the cause of everything, no science is possible, no real knowledge can be fairly constituted, because the answer to any question is automatic, every “why?” will immediately get its predictable answer: “Because of the will of the Gods.”

In this regard, we can understand why 17^th century philosopher Spinoza said that the “will of God” – not the gods of the Greek polytheism now, but the transcendent one of monotheisms, that is to say religions with only one god – can be “the sanctuary of ignorance.”⁷ As Epicurus and Greek atomists did before him, Spinoza calls for the study of nature, the understanding of the causes explaining our actions. Our freedom? An illusion, Spinoza writes:

Men are deceived in thinking themselves free, a belief [my emphasis] that consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined. Therefore, the idea of their freedom is simply the ignorance of the cause of their actions. (264)

Unlike Epicurus, Spinoza does not reject the divine to the margins of our universe, he rather erases the difference between the world and the divine: “God, or nature,” (deus sive natura) you can use the word you want, it does not matter for nature and God are the same (324). There is not, on the one side, an almighty Creator and its marvelous power of creation and, on the other side, poor passive and deprived Creatures; there is for Spinoza one immanent world – that is to say a world without transcendence, without a Supreme Being exterior to it. The more we understand the world, the more we learn to love the natural necessity that justifies the existence of every being, this kind of love being called by Spinoza “beatitude.” That said, one could ask oneself: If the divine is contained out of the world (Epicurus), or is indistinguishable from it (Spinoza), are we far away from atheism, that is to say a world without (as the a- of atheism means) a God (hence theism coming from the Greek theós: god)? A second question stems from the first one: How did humanity pass form a materialist containment of the divine (Epicurus) to its possible disappearance (atheism)? Let us answer this question in the following section.

The death of God

In the 18^th century, thinkers of the Enlightenment were fighting against superstition and fanaticism, the first being defined as “any excess of religion in general,” and the second as “superstition put into practice,” to quote respectively Louis de Jaucourt and Alexandre Deleyre, authors who participated in the famous Diderot and D’Alembert Encyclopedia.⁸ The fights against superstition, against fanaticism, and against religious intolerance, were not directly – or necessarily – done to get rid of God, but to limit the field of action of those who, in the name of God, were persecuting believers in other religions. “God, why not?” many Enlightenment philosophers and scientists thought in the 18^th century; But religious “excess,” no thanks.

That being said, we can easily understand how this emancipatory war against any religious excess has paved the way to atheism. In the 19^th century, a deep wave of atheism submerged the European culture. Nietzsche, a German philosopher of the 19^th century, is well known for his famous statement, first enunciated in The Gay Science (1882): “God is dead.”⁹ By this, Nietzsche meant that there are no transcendent values, and no transcendent world, that is to say no outer-world severed from the only one that exists: Ours. In Twilight of the Idols (1888), he explained “how the ‘true world’” – that is to say an outer-world that would be a world of eternal essences, compared to which our world would be nothing else than a pale copy doomed to crumble – “finally became a fable.”¹⁰ A fable in which we should not believe any longer, the German philosopher kept arguing. Forty years before Nietzsche, the young philosopher Marx was giving an explanation for our credulity, our tendency to believe in the fable of the outer-world: Religion, he famously said, is “the opium of the people,” adding that

The ...