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Part 1
A History of the Categories
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1 Matter and Materialism
A Brief Pre-History of the Present
John Frow
I
For the last half century or thereabouts the linked concepts of the material, materiality and materialism have worked in the social and human sciences as a very particular kind of fetish. Distantly deriving from the tradition of dialectical materialism, their use promises serious commitment to a methodology that situates cultural or political, legal or experiential matters in relation to social power, social institutions, economic forces, or some bundle thereof. Yet the word ‘material’ here is not self-explanatory, since ‘it does not have a great deal to do with the type of force, causality, efficacy, and obstinacy non-human actants possess in the world. “Matter” … is a highly politicised interpretation of causality’ (Latour, 2005: 76).
Let me begin my exploration of the antecedents and the aporias of these concepts with a representative, if unusually complex and nuanced, example of their usage. In the 1980 collection Problems in Materialism and Culture, describing the development of the philosophical position he calls ‘cultural materialism’, Raymond Williams writes of the emphasis he had come to place ‘on the production (rather than only the reproduction) of meanings and values by specific social formations, on the centrality of language and communication as formative social forces, and on the complex interaction both of institutions and forms and of social relationships and formal conventions’. Cultural materialism, he continues, is
a theory of culture as a (social and material) productive process and of specific practices, of ‘arts’, as social uses of material means of production (from language as material “practical consciousness” to the specific technologies of writing and forms of writing, through to mechanical and electronic communication systems).
(Williams, 1980: 243)
In these passages, as in many others in Williams’s oeuvre, we witness a process of translation by which an older Marxist language of base and superstructure is recast to assimilate the ‘superstructures’ (‘meanings and values’, culture, language and communication) to the forces of production, and in the same movement the aestheticising language of literary and cultural criticism (formal conventions, culture, the ‘arts’) is displaced into the language of practice, of materiality, and of technology.
These are familiar enough moves in the trajectory of Western Marxism away from the crippling metaphors of reduction, derivation and determination with which Marxist orthodoxy accounted for the domain of culture. They govern Williams’s repeated assertion of the ‘materiality’ of cultural production (cf. Milner, 1993: 62–63) or, to take a more finely-grained example, his insistence on treating writing as a system not of signs but of notations (Williams, 1977: 169). ‘Notations’ puts the emphasis on a process rather than its result, and displaces attention from meanings to the physical particularity of the mark on the page.
Yet that particularity cannot be the whole point, for the difference between writing and those objects (paintings, for example) whose semiotic force lies in their difference from every other such object1 is that the notations making up writing are necessarily repeatable; unless our interest is in type-faces or calligraphy, we attend not to the variations between notations but to the element of commonality that we call meaning. It is true, of course, that meaning is inflected by what we think of as the materiality of the signifier: by intonation and cadence as they are carried by the voice, by font and layout, by script; yet these signifiers are also, for the most part, repeatable; it is not their materiality of itself that matters but their repeated organisation of phonic and graphic matter.
The invocation of materiality thus seems to me either wrong or trivial: trivial because no one doubts that meanings and practices are always and necessarily materially embedded; wrong because it is not the materiality of meanings and practices that gives them their social force but rather the particular social and cultural frameworks that govern how they are deployed. What puzzles me, and what I want to explore here, is how readily the concept of the material has come to act as a shorthand for something quite different (Bhaskar, for example, casually notes that in Marx’s ‘practical materialism’ the concept of matter ‘is to be understood in the sense of “social practice” ’: a non-sequitur for anybody not in the know) (Bhaskar, 1983: 327); and I’ll ask whether it is worth hanging on to this shorthand that shores up a truth claim rather than doing serious intellectual work.
II
Philosophical materialism in the West is carried in two major waves: that of classical antiquity, and that of the European Enlightenment.2 The former develops around an ontological question about the basic stuff of the universe and how it is organised, and its most interesting answer is the thesis that the fundamental matter of being is atoms moving in random motion through the void. The Great Diakosmos, a lost work written by one or both of Leucippus and Democritus in the Athens of the late fifth century BCE, argues that moments of organisation of matter come about as a result of the collision of atoms, resulting in vortices which push the heavier atoms to the centre and thus form bodies. In the later work of Epicurus and of Lucretius, it is the slight deviation of atoms from uniform motion that produces collisions, vortices and thus moments of random order in a context of universal entropy. In this tradition consciousness, too, is understood in terms of the impact of atoms upon the human senses, and thus as a purely physical process.
The materialism of the European Enlightenment is intimately connected with the experimental method of the new physics and its refusal of non-material explanations of physical processes. The methodological starting point for such writers as Gassendi and Hobbes is an assumption that there is no part of the universe that is not a material body, and that no part of the universe contains no body; change and variation take place through the motion and contact of bodies, and sensation is an interchange between two material entities. The central philosophical questions here tend to be not so much about the primordial stuff of the universe as about the laws of motion and interaction of bodies, and the relations between matter and consciousness: that is to say, the relation of secondary representations of matter to matter (is thought also material, or is it different in kind from matter? Or, as Marx succinctly put it, ‘can matter think’? [Ob die Materie nicht denken könne?] [Marx, 1975: 128]). In the later phases of the Enlightenment – in the work of La Mettrie, d’Holbach and Helvétius – these questions shift on the one hand into questions of causality and determinism organised by the figure of the machine, and on the other into the systematic critique of religion.
At the core of both of these traditions is an assumption that matter is in some sense fundamental and independent of human representations of it. What might be meant by the term ‘matter’ itself is, of course, a more complex question. From the enquiries of the Ionian metaphysicians of 600 BC onwards, the key question has been about the nature of that substance that underlies the multiplicity of its instantiations: what Robert Boyle in 1666 called ‘one universal matter, common to all bodies, an extended, divisible, and impenetrable substance’ (quoted in Toulmin and Goodfield, 1962: 180). Matter in this sense is an abstraction from the materials of the world. Atomism answers the primary question about the basic stuff (the world is made up of particles and the forces that hold them together or apart – forces that Empedokles called ‘Love and Strife’); but it gives much less satisfactory answers to the question of how this stuff becomes differentiated into the actual variety of specific forms. Various continuist theories posit a principle or a medium of organisation of matter: the Stoics’ pneuma, Newton’s aether, or the force fields of contemporary physics all seek to move beyond the notion of a merely random agglomeration of particles. If relatively stable answers seemed to emerge within the framework of the Newtonian cosmos, however, they have been greatly complicated with the emergence of quantum mechanics, where the components of that cosmos – mass and energy, particles and forces – have come increasingly to be seen as moments of each other rather than analytically distinct entities.
III
My concern here, however, is not directly with these questions, but rather with the formation of the versions of materialism associated with Marx, since I take it that it is these materialisms and the models of causal interaction associated with them that feed most strongly into contemporary uses of the concept of materiality in the social and human sciences. Marx always explicitly associated himself with the materialist tradition; his doctoral dissertation explored the differences between the atomic materialisms of Democritus and Epicurus, and his decisive break with Hegel was mediated by Feuerbach’s materialist inversion of Hegel’s idealist ontology. In Marx’s earliest works the force of materialism is primarily to underpin the critique of religion, which he sees as being central to any process of revolutionary change; with the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, however, the simple opposition of an anthropological materialism to an ultimately theological idealism is complicated by an assertion of the constitutive role of human praxis in the shaping of the world and our knowledge of it.
What is striking about the ‘Theses’ is the way they explicitly marry materialist and idealist positions in seeking to move beyond what for Marx is the passive way in which Feuerbach conceives of the external world as an objective given. Avineri, contrasting Marx’s position with Engels’s later mechanical materialism, summarises its originality as well as its continuing indebtedness to Hegel as follows:
Marx’s postulate about the ultimate possibility of human self-emancipation must be related to his philosophical premise about the initial creation of the world by man. Philosophically such a view is a secular version of the Hegelian notion that actuality [Wirklichkeit] is not an external, objective datum, but is shaped by human agency. For Hegel this shaping is performed by consciousness; Marx extricates the activist element of Hegel’s doctrine from its metaphysical setting and combines it with a materialist epistemology.
(Avineri, 1968: 65)
This move, which was combined as early as the 1844 Manuscripts, but more systematically in The German Ideology, with a grounding of human practice in the system of production of material life (that is, in work performed in an organised and socially systemic manner upon raw materials), initiates a more complex model of materialism than that of Helvétius and d’Holbach or of Feuerbach.
This is the first sentence of the crucial first thesis:
The chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that things [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation [Anschauung], but not as sensuous human activity [menschliche sinnliche Tätigkeit], practice, not subjectively.
(Marx, 1976a: 3)
‘Contemplation’ here is used in the sense of ‘registration of the external world in the form of sensory data’; rather than positing a more active engagement with the world, for Feuerbach ‘man the species-being, provided with merely natural qualities, confronts the dead objectivity of nature passively and intuitively rather than actively and practically, in a subjectivity which remains empty’ (Schmidt, 1971: 27). The more active relation to the object world that Marx proposes is associated with the idealist tradition, which however ‘does not know real, sensuous activity as such’ (Marx, 1976a: 3).
Praxis works in the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ not just as an anthropological concept or an asocial individualism but also as the beginnings of a conception of the human ‘subject’ as a network of social relations. This is obscured by a certain naïve empiricism in Marx’s assertion that to the abstraction of idealist conceptions of the subject (as consciousness or spirit) he will oppose the concrete reality of ‘living human individuals’ (Marx, 1976b: 31) (itself, of course, another abstraction in which the ‘concrete’ is understood as a quasi-immediacy rather than as a concept mediated by its conditions of possibility). Yet the force of the concept of praxis, understood in Marx’s early writings above all as the work of transformation of nature, lies in the way it combines with the critique of political economy to generate a theory of the subject and object of work that fuses the two terms as moments of the social relations of production. Displacing an anthropology of the subject and a metaphysics of the (material) object,3 Marx’s critique develops an account of the class-based organisation of the system of production and appropriation of value which allows for no simple separation of these two poles.
This is, in its mature form, an account of the relationality of the social, not of its materiality. As Richard Osborne puts it:
The question of how a network of relations in flux can be encompassed within a view that calls itself ‘materialism’ is frustratingly left unaddressed by Marx in these fragments. He simply stresses the sensible character of human practices. But these are social only because they relate to each other, rather than because of their sensuous materiality … We are not told how social relations themselves might be explained ‘materially’.
(Osborne, 2005: 30)
In particular, the turn that Marx’s work takes in the ‘Theses’ decisively distances it from the problematic of an ontology of matter. There can be no nature ‘in itself’ and apart from or prior to human mediation, since ‘on the one hand, it includes the forms of human society; on the other, it only appears in thought and in reality in virtue of these forms’ (Schmidt, 1971: 29). The writings of Marx thus have little to do with the traditional preoccupations of philosophical materialism: the metaphysical postulate ‘that there is only one “substance” in the world, matter, and everything else (thought, for example) is a modification or an attribute of it’ (Osborne, 2005: 27). Yet this is how they have been read within what is perhaps the dominant, tradition of Marxist thought.
One form taken by this reading is the apparently ‘weak’ doctrine ‘that something exists independently of thought (and mind)’ (Rubin, 1977: 63). Materialism, on this account, is not a ‘strong’ reduction of cognition to matter, but merely asserts the ontological distinction of the object from human interaction with it. Yet even this apparently innocuous thesis fits poorly with Marx’s understanding of the constitutive role of praxis, and Rubin – who is at least scrupulous about whether his claims correspond to the text of Marx – concedes that his argument holds true only for fully natural objects, not for the social world. Rubin cites a passage from The German Ideology which apparently asserts the independence of ‘external nature’. As the culmination of a long argument that Feuerbach ‘does not see that the sensuous world around him is not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but a product of industry and of the state of society’, Marx adds the qualification that ‘Of course in all this the priority of external nature remains unassailed, and all this has no application to the original men produced by generatio equivoca’ (1976b: 39–40); but Marx’s immediate qualification is then that
nature, the nature that preceded human history, is not by any means the nature in which Feuerbach lives, it is nature which today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral islands of recent origin) and which, therefore, does not exist for Feuerbach.
(Marx, 1976b: 40)
Nature is now, for all intents and purposes, socialised, or at least Marx’s whole interest is in the social world and its constant transformations of the natural: not matter in itself but matter transformed into the stuff of social interaction, and ‘known’ to the extent that it is the object of human praxis. For Rubin to object – as the core of his counter-claim – that ‘there are distant parts of the universe which … can never by mediated by man’ (1977: 82) is at once trivial, contesta...
