The rumor of the death of the subject has been spread for several decades now. Every so often obituaries appear, proclaiming its demise. It is presented by theorists as decentered in and by language, split by the unconscious, deformed by social forces, governed by ideology, and seen either to have succumbed to the postmodern condition or to never have existed in the first place. In The Ticklish Subject, Slavoj Žižek writes that in the Western social sciences and humanities there seems to be a wide consensus concerning the rejection of the traditional concept of the subject (cf. Žižek 2000, p. 1). This consensus, reaching from sociology, linguistics, and philosophy to literary theory and cultural studies, in a large part rests on a simplified rejection of what is almost interchangeably called the idealist, the Cartesian, the autonomous, or the bourgeois subject.
Descartes’s self-transparent thinking subject, which dominated the Western understanding of subjectivity for almost 300 years after the publication of the Meditations, constitutes itself in the immaterial realm of the ideal. This ideational reality stands in opposition to the material world, which is of an entirely different ontological order. The dichotomies of material/immaterial as well as subject/object lie at the core of the idealist conception of the subject. What makes the Cartesian model an idealist one is its insistence on the primacy of the immaterial and ideal. The contemporary dissatisfaction with the Cartesian model and other idealist theories is, in many ways, well founded. Unsurprisingly, these idealisms have not been able to satisfyingly address and explicate the relation between subject and object, since they largely simply exclude material instances from their theories of the subject. What is more surprising and troubling, however, is that more recent scholarship, decidedly concerned with ‘materiality’ and a renewal of materialism, has not addressed the subject and its relation to ‘matter’ or materiality adequately either.
In materialist philosophy and theory the material takes primacy over the ideal. Therefore it can rely neither on the Cartesian Cogito nor on other idealist philosophies of the subject derived from it. The subject can consequently not be conceived of as an original, immaterial, and autonomous entity; rather it should be taken to be an effect, a process, or an endpoint, constituted in and by material reality. In this apparent inversion of idealism, the material now becomes the instance in which the subject is constituted. What this ‘material’ denotes is of central importance for the reach and explanatory power of materialism. Every materialist theory of the subject thus depends on a conception of materiality, which can delineate the character of what material reality consists of.
Only in the past few decades has materiality emerged as a field of study, crossing disciplinary boundaries and providing novel perspectives on social and cultural phenomena. The recently developing fields of material culture studies, 1 as well as what is called New Materialism,2 encompass a multiplicity of approaches to various elements of the material world. In the social sciences and humanities the general increase in research concerned with material objects and materiality has been described as a ‘material turn’ (cf. e.g. Bennett and Joyce 2010). What, not long ago, was still considered as irreconcilable with the social and cultural is now studied as a part and sometimes an expression of the latter. The multitude of papers and books published on the topic of materiality can by no means be said to constitute a field of research representing a homogenous theory or a common definition of what is to be included in the study of the ‘material.’
However, many of them appear, despite their heterogeneity, to be united in an eerie preoccupation with ‘things’ and ‘matter’ and in a surprisingly persistent exclusion of certain fundamental kinds of materiality. This is, at least partly, due to a pervasive understanding of materiality which not infrequently reverts to a reductionist materialism by restricting materiality to matter or matter in motion. This notion, then, conceives of material entities either as passive objects waiting to be acted upon and manipulated, or alternatively as exerting a persistent effectivity, agency, or vitality of some sort. In the first case, material entities are sometimes regarded as materializations of the immaterial or ideational (like ‘culture,’ social relations, or identity). In the other extreme, as a persistent and effective part of reality, they impose themselves as extra-cultural and extra-social forces. Regarding the material as just one, albeit privileged, realm of existence while retaining the ideational in the form of ‘culture,’ ‘the subject,’ ‘language’ or ‘thought’ simply inverts idealism without abandoning its dichotomous categories. Furthermore, approaches to materiality that limit their inquiries to phenomena that consist of matter necessarily exclude modalities of materiality not readily identifiable as tangible, solid or given.
Jane Bennett, to take just one prominent proponent of New Materialism, is predominantly concerned with the ‘vital materiality’ of ‘lively things’ and the ‘vibrant matter’ that gave one of her books its name (Bennett 2010b, pp. vii–viii). Such a post-Deleuzian, self-described ‘thing-power materialism’ (Bennett 2010a, p. 47) neither adheres to the old dichotomies of subject and object, nor does it talk of things as being comprised of simple, passive matter. Rather, it grants them a vitality which, in a sense, allows the things to act. ‘Agency’ is shared, or distributed, between human and non-human actors. The occupation with different aspects of and entities in the material world, and their role in social practices and the social in general as well as in the formation of subjectivity, is no doubt justified and even crucial, it will be argued later. The fact, however, that Bennett and others discuss materiality in a way that favors matter and things, while enchanting the two with vitality and vibrancy, makes intelligible the accusation that they posit ‘matter against materialism’ (Noys 2015)—and particularly against the historical, discursive, and dialectical kinds.
Even though in Bennett’s influential book the ‘topic of subjectivity… gets short shrift’ (Bennett 2010b, p. ix)—which is certainly no coincidence—it can be said that many of the ‘flat ontologies’ and ‘thing-oriented’ philosophies in her general proximity, while rejecting the Cartesian subject, reduce subjectivity to agency and affect disseminated in assemblages of human and non-human actors without developing a theory of (what takes the place of) the subject or accounting for its constitution and decentering.3 The opposite, namely retaining the notion of an autonomous, centered subject that is the source and origin of social practice and intentional activity, is by no means a viable alternative, as we will see. The ‘free’ subject of classical humanism; the intentional actor of some interactionist sociologies; the rational individual of economics; or the subject as fount of transparent original meaning, that lives on in some divisions of hermeneutics—none of these are suitable for a materialist approach to the subject, either. Thus, we will have to look somewhere else. I suggest turning to some slightly ‘older’—dialectical, historical, discursive, semiotic—materialisms to help us work through the relation between materiality and the subject. The last turn in the social sciences and humanities (the ‘material’ one) might have been a wrong turn—if only in the sense that it left some crucial things behind.
This book offers readings of the approaches of Marxism, (post-)structuralism, and material semiotics and presents the three as contributing in different ways to something like a non-reductionist ‘materialism without matter,’ to use Balibar’s term (2007, p. 23). This does not entail disregarding the importance of material ‘objects’ and ‘things.’ Rather, it highlights a dissociation from reductive materialisms of matter and underlines the claim that materiality is multiple, complex, and not reducible to tangible matter. In such a materialism, the subject is seen as an effect of material conditions, relations, processes, and practices. The relation between materiality and the subject as well as the mechanisms by and through which the subject is constituted in this relation comprise the second focus of our investigation. Thus, this short monograph establishes some characteristics of a non-reductionist materialism, which in turn constitutes the basis for a materialist theory of the subject that does not exhaust itself in a mere rejection of the Cartesian subject.
This book consists of five parts. Chapter 2 provides a brief philosophical prelude to what follows. It takes the Cartesian subject as well as its relation to the material world, the res extensa, as its point of departure as they serve as a background before which other conceptualizations of subjectivity can be characterized. To further grasp the idealist conception of the subject, Kant’s transcendental idealism as well as Hegel’s absolute idealism are discussed in regard to their respective conceptualization of subjectivity and materiality. It will be argued that the problem of the relation between the (immaterial) subject and material reality played a constitutive role for the philosophies designated as German idealism.
In the second part (Chap. 3) we will engage with Marx’s materialism. The reading of Marx proposed here counters characterizations of Marxism as a deterministic, mechanistic, or economistic materialism in which subjects and their ideas are directly and univocally determined by the conditions they find themselves in. The chapter explores the multifarious materiality of material conditions as well as its relation to the ideological subject constituted in it. To this end central aspects of historical materialism are introduced and three notions of ideology implicit in Marx’s work are identified and critically evaluated. It will be suggested that materiality appears in different, albeit interrelated modalities, none of which correlate with passive matter, and that the subject is constituted in these materialities.
Although Marxian theory offers a sound foundation for a non-reductionist materialism and a materialist theory of the subject, it will be maintained that the concepts of modes of production and ideology need revision. Chapter 4 introduces Louis Althusser’s and Fredric Jameson’s Marxisms as necessary extensions to classical Marxism which allow us to further determine the exact mechanisms and the kind of effectivity by which material conditions, as modes of production, condition the subject. The first part of the chapter revises the edificial model of base and superstructure and further refines the understanding of the concept of modes of production by arguing that it should not be restricted to the narrowly defined economic. The second part deals with Althusser’s theory of ideology as it is found in his seminal text Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Althusser 1972). Here, the subject appears as an effect of material ideological practices. The chapter closes with a typology of the different modalities of materiality encountered in Chaps. 3 and 4.
Chapter 5 turns to those approaches inspired by Saussurean semiotics, Marxism, and psychoanalysis commonly referred to as (post-)structuralism. Focusing on the materiality of language and discourse and its relation to the subject, this part in a first step introduces Saussure’s structural linguistic...