This collection of chapters—as its title suggests—attends to literature and philosophy from the long nineteenth century that engages with the material world in a way that anticipates or pre-empts the kinds of debates now being offered under the umbrella term of “new materialism”. Anticipatory Materialisms aims to draw attention to the lively debates about the agency and force of matter taking place within the literature of the Romantic, Victorian and Modern periods that are under threat of being overlooked or overwritten by the claim of newness inherent within the recent turn to materiality. Our title is intended to signal both an engagement with new materialism and a statement of resistance to its claim—explicit or implicit—to innovation.
Talk of a “material turn” has been increasingly prevalent across the arts and humanities over the past two decades. Discussions have revolved around an apparently new steer in philosophical and critical writings, away from a Cartesian relegation of the physical world and towards an increased attentiveness to the material world as semi-autonomous, self-governing and self-organising. This “new materialism” (purposefully) evades finite definition. Indicated in our own choice to pluralise the term in the title of this volume, it includes a range of schools, movements and disciplines, and is associated with a range of figures including Jane Bennett, Gilles Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz (2004), Tim Ingold, Karen Barad and Bruno Latour. The label loosely points to recent approaches that pay close attention to the physical processes and interactions between nature, corporeality and the material world. Its stimulus lies in re-evaluating human-world relationships by highlighting the role of the nonhuman in reaction to what has been seen as an oversight in structuralism’s and poststructuralism’s attention to linguistic and semiotic meaning. While deconstruction’s often misrepresented mantra, “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (there is no outside-text), was often taken as an assertion of there being no extra-linguistic reality, so a crude summation of new materialism’s position reveals the other side of the coin: there is nothing—not even sentience—without matter.
We do not attempt in this introduction to offer an exhaustive, or even thorough, overview of new materialist philosophies and writings, excellent versions of which can be found elsewhere (van der Tuin and Dolphijn 2000; Ellenzweig and Zammito 2017; for critiques see Eagleton (2017) and briefly Žižek (2014, 15)). Instead we offer here an outline that aligns with the purposes of this collection: to trace the strand of new materialist thought that this volume seeks to redress, to unearth “monist thought” or attention to material agency in philosophical and literary writings that pre-date the so-called material turn, and to highlight their prevalence in the long nineteenth century.
What is striking about new materialism’s choice of nomenclature is its obvious self-declaration of novelty. The claim is iterated in scholarly work that makes explicit attempts to specify, and in turn justify, the “newness” of the field. Part of the declaration of newness is a conscious distancing of this “new” attention to matter from the “old” historical materialism of Marxist theory that has been so dominant in English literary studies for decades and especially so since the latter half of the twentieth century. But beyond the distinction to materialism proper, there is a self-conscious claim to exception within many new materialist philosophers and critics. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost write in their collection, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, that “we nevertheless persist in our call for and observation of a new materialism, […] because we are aware that unprecedented things are currently being done with and to matter, nature, life, production, and reproduction” (2010, 4). Yet Coole and Frost simultaneously acknowledge that many of these contributions “draw inspiration from materialist traditions developed prior to modernity or from philosophies that have until recently remained neglected or marginalized currents within modern thinking” (2010, 4). Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin nuance the relation between the new and old in their edited collection, New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, writing: “It is in the resonances between old and new readings and re-readings that a ‘new metaphysics’ might announce itself” (2012, 13). While the editors foreground that a “new metaphysics is not restricted to a here and now”, the scope of their project is such that the volume offers “re-readings” of a handful of precedent philosophical thinkers including Spinoza, Bergson, Whitehead, William James and Edmund Husserl. They offer what they call a “new reading of the monist tradition”, approaches to the world that advocate a unity to existence, for which they acknowledge a long but neglected history, “overcoded by dualist forms of thinking” (van der Tuin and Dolphijn 2000, 154).
The editors of both volumes on new materialist thought are well aware that they are writing into a history of attention to materiality that goes back centuries. Many writings on new materialism acknowledge a rich history of materialist philosophical thinking, to the neglect of other forms of aesthetic expression. (Indeed, Ellenzweig and Zammito argue that “sensitivity to matter’s lively properties was even more developed and widespread in earlier traditions” (2017, 5) in their exploration of philosophical works.) Where such works have been recognised for their (overlooked and neglected) attention to the agency of the material world—albeit in ways that are considered antecedent or preliminary in comparison to more recent philosophical interventions—the complex engagement with agential materiality in literary works has received less notice. This collection aims to begin addressing such an oversight not by mapping new materialist thinking onto antecedent works, but by attending precisely to contemporaneous expressions of materiality’s agency as well as interrogating the specific resonances between “old” and “new” writings on materiality. As such, this collection attempts to read forwards, rather than backwards.
The narrative trajectory of new materialism, even when peppered by acknowledgement of antecedents like Lucretius, Spinoza or Nietzsche, is familiarly teleological: dualist thinking subjugated matter and recent philosophy has revolutionised our approach to the world and the human by revealing the depth and complexity of the world’s network of forces. But this is too neat a story, which pushes aside the debates, conflicts and strands of thinking that assembled alongside the strong voice of dualist thinking. The chapters in this volume testify to the ways in which literary, philosophical and scientific thinking across the long nineteenth century has often been deeply invested in the agency and forces of matter. The volume seeks to demonstrate that the dominance of dualist models did not impede debates about human-world relations or the life of materiality beyond humanity. It shows instead how literature of the period attends to the agency of both humans and nonhumans, as well as the inter-relations and “intra-action” (Barad 2001, 89) between them, expressing precisely the variations and complexities of processual embodied activity. By exploring the agency of the human and the nonhuman, the chapters in this collection observe the embodied and simultaneously active and passive human responses to objects and things in a way that acknowledges the liveliness of matter. In doing so, a broader aim of this volume is to redress the relative negligence of attention to the aesthetic writings of the long nineteenth century in new materialist writings. We seek to demonstrate how the cadences, rhythms and affective qualities of literature, as well as the sensuous, somatic experience that exists in sites of writing and reading—how linguistic expression (rather than representation)—have and continue to play an active role in shaping our relationship with the matter of the world. The literary as a privileged site of affective expression is noted, merely in passing, by the geographer Nigel Thrift writing that to access the working of affect within cities, “it is necessary to resort to the pages of novels, and the tracklines of poems” (2007, 171).
New materialist philosophies inevitably set themselves in opposition to approaches to the material world wherein nature is considered a predictable, inert substance, passively responding to the organising efforts of humanity. Especially in the era of the enlightenment and colonialism—the period covered by the chapters in this collection—humans were celebrated as world-makers, presuming and practising manipulation and control of a world represented as made up of inactive matter (and too often inactive humans as well). In such frameworks, nature depends on the gaze and care of humanity, it is something always known through the prism of subjectivity and therefore shaped by, constructed through, and dependent upon such subjectivity. As Ellenzweig and Zammito note, “New materialism takes the privilege of the human—with its supposed marks of exception in rationality, subjectivity, and agency—to have been the ideological supplement that the humanities have contributed to the juggernaut of capitalism, technoscience, and political domination” (2017, 1–2). New materialism rejects this privilege to instead champion the agency, dynamism and power of nonhuman matter in ways that have extensive implications in terms of the very conceptualisation of the human-nonhuman binary itself.
Marxist thinkers of the agency of material-human relations have long understood human society and culture through their material relations. Critics such as Jason W. Moore (2015) and Jason Edwards (2010) argue for the continuity of historical and new materialism in which recent innovations are extensions into the greater complexities of global and ecological practices. What differentiates materialism from its newer manifestations is that whereas historical materialism lays claim to being one of the most influential political philosophies as well as interpretive frames of the past century, the political commitments of new materialism are markedly less specific (see Ellenzweig and Zammito 2017). New materialism does not ascribe to an exact politics or ethics and instead part of its strategy of relegating human agendas is that it attends to the less predictable forms and forces of matter that lead to no certain or mappable outcome. For new materialists, materiality is always a process and always in process: the things and objects of the world are constellations of energy and vitality.
While not allied with any definite political understanding of the world, the self-proclaimed innovations of new materialist thinking nonetheless point towards its “radical” political stimulus, albeit unattached to any specific politics. As Dolphijn and van der Tuin write, “new materialism produces a revolution in thought by traversing modernity’s dualisms” (2012, 115). New materialism is most often aligned with an ecological ethos, attending to the responsibilities incumbent upon humanity in a world configured as a dynamic processual character of networks and relations between the human and nonhuman. In the works of writers like Jane Bennett and Donna Haraway, the realisation of the natural world’s autonomy, t...
