Sociology and the New Materialism

Theory, Research, Action

Nick J. Fox, Pam Alldred

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473988149
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The first book of its kind, Sociology and the New Materialism explores the many and varied applications of "new materialism, " a key emerging trend in 21st century thought, to the practice of doing sociology.

Offering a clear exposition of new materialist theory and using sociological examples throughout to enable the reader to develop a materialist sociological understanding, the book:

• Outlines the fundamental precepts of new materialism
• Explores how materialism provides new perspectives on the range of sociological topic areas
• Explains how materialist approaches can be used to research sociological issues and also to engage with social issues.

Sociology and the New Materialism is a clear and authoritative one-stop guide for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates in sociology, cultural studies, social policy and related disciplines.

Part 1 New Materialism and the Sociological Imagination

1 Introduction

This is a book designed for social scientists, and more specifically for sociologists. It is about sociology and for sociology: its core aim is to suggest what the new materialism can offer to a sociological imagination, and for the exploration of the social problems and topics that concern those working, studying, teaching and researching in sociology. It is the book on new materialisms that we would want to read ourselves, as we are accustomed to focusing on practical and policy issues in areas such as gender and sexuality, education, health, technology, social inequalities and so forth. Our primary concern with new materialism is as a tool to help us do social research that is both appropriate and useful; to gain fresh insights into the myriad of aspects of society and social processes that assail us on all sides; to make sense of the social world in ways that can offer solutions to social problems; and to try to frame and support activism towards environmental and social justice.

For these reasons, we do not intend to devote the next 200 pages to an exposition of the differing theories that make up the new materialisms, or engage in closely-argued point-scoring over other social science perspectives such as post-structuralism or critical realism. There are other texts that set out to do these things, and we will provide suggested reading for those readers who wish to explore them. Instead, we are going to spend our time and yours exploring the practical applications of new materialism to the practice of doing sociology – offering critical insights into the social world, developing theory that can explain human societies and cultures, and undertaking empirical research to answer specific sociological questions.

In the humanities and social sciences, ‘new materialism’ has become a collective term used to denote a range of perspectives that have in common what has been described as a ‘turn to matter’. Possibly the best known of these in contemporary sociology is actor-network theory (Law, 1992) – an approach that recognizes non-human agency that has been applied most widely in science and technology studies. However, the variety of approaches now described as ‘new materialisms’ are mind-numbingly diverse, drawing on perspectives from biophilosophy to quantum physics to queer and feminist theories (Coole and Frost, 2010: 4). As the name implies, these perspectives emphasize the materiality of the world and everything – social and natural – within it. What these various approaches have in common is a concern with the material workings of power, and a focus firmly upon social production rather than upon social construction (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 4; Taylor and Ivinson, 2013: 666).

Materialism is nothing new within sociology, of course, and later in this introduction we will recall the rise and demise of ‘old’ materialist sociology during the 20th century. The new materialist sociology that is now emerging is in no way a return to this earlier emphasis, however. Instead it has taken on board insights from the ‘linguistic turn’ of post-structuralism and constructivism that have rejected the earlier materialism’s deterministic explanations of social organization and social action, and recognized intricate links between power and resistance, language and knowledge, bodies and subjectivity (Fox, 2016; Game, 1991; Nash, 2001; Parker, 1992; Rose, 1999). Among the radical claims of new materialist theorists are the propositions that:

• the material world and its contents are not fixed, stable entities, but relational, uneven, and in constant flux (Barad, 1996; Coole and Frost, 2010: 29; Lemke, 2015);
• ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ should not to be treated as distinct realms, but as parts of a continuum of materiality. The physical and the social both have material effects in an ever-changing world (Braidotti, 2013: 3; Haraway, 1997: 209); and
• a capacity for ‘agency’ – the actions that produce the social world – extends beyond human actors to the non-human and inanimate (Braidotti, 2013; DeLanda, 2006; Latour, 2005).

Many of these claims run directly counter to the mainstream sociological ontology (Karakayali, 2015), and in the early chapters of this book we will look fully at the basis for these assertions by new materialist scholars. But as we begin this exploration of a new materialist sociology, it is worth noting that – both theoretically and when applied to empirical research – these statements both challenge some foundational propositions of contemporary sociology, and radically extend materialist analysis beyond traditional concerns with structural and ‘macro’ level social phenomena (van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2010: 159). First, they shift sociological focus from individuals and human subjects to how relational networks or assemblages of animate and inanimate affect and are affected (DeLanda, 2006: 4; Mulcahy, 2012: 10; Youdell and Armstrong, 2011: 145). Second, they recognize that the production of the social world is due to a wide variety of forces, including desires, feelings and meanings (Braidotti, 2000: 159; DeLanda, 2006; 5). Finally, they supply a posthuman (Braidotti; 2006a: 37; 2013: 169) focus for the social sciences and social inquiry that does not privilege humans in relation to the rest of the natural and social environment.

Materialism re-booted

To begin our odyssey toward a new materialist social science, and to understand more what the turn to matter means for sociology, it is worth looking back briefly to previous sociological materialisms. Materialism was a significant feature of early sociology, most notably within the work of Karl Marx, though also for Durkheim, in whose perspective both material factors and human consciousness contributed to the production of society (Durkheim, 1984: 223), and for Weber, whose analysis of capitalism and ideology acknowledged material factors (Weber, 1930: 183).

At its most emblematic, Marx’s ‘historical materialist’ formulation provided sociology with a means to describe and explain contemporary social processes. Its sociological analysis focused on the historical development of social institutions and practices, within a broad economic and political context of material production and consumption (Edwards, 2010: 282). This emphasis inflected materialist analysis with a concern with ‘structural’ or ‘macro-level’ forces deriving from the social relations of production; typically – in contemporary sociology – of capitalist production. All of social life, from patterns of work and material consumption to family formations and gendered divisions of labour, was explained in terms of these relations of production. Power was conceptualized as a top-down phenomenon, exerted by a dominant social class over an oppressed class of working people (Giddens, 1981: 58; Nigam, 1996: 9; van Krieken, 1991).

This materialist strand within sociology was progressively diluted during the last century. A rival ‘idealist’ thread (which emphasized the part human ideas, beliefs and values shape society) began with Simmel, Weber and Mead, and led through Schütz, interpretivism and phenomenology variously to interactionism, some forms of social constructionism, and humanistic sociology (Berger and Luckmann, 1971: 208; Nash, 2001: 78; Shalin, 1990). Meanwhile, the emergence of micro-sociologies focused increasingly on interaction, experiences, knowledge and eventually ‘discourse’ (Berger and Kellner, 1964; Mulkay, 1985; Scheff, 1994).

The feminist and post-colonial sociologies that grew in parallel with this idealist thread criticized Marxian materialism for a narrow or reductionist focus upon social class, at the expense of recognition of the power relations between genders, between races and between other social divisions, and of the interactions between these disparate and independent processes of oppression (Barrett and McIntosh, 1982; Crenshaw, 1989; Hall, 1996; Henriques et al., 1998; MacKinnon, 1982). The demise of the Soviet bloc in the 1980s may also have undermined the authority of a sociology founded in historical or dialectical materialism (Pakulski, 1993: 287; Rojek and Turner, 2000: 635).

For all these reasons, when the post-structuralist or ‘linguistic’ turn in the social sciences – informed by feminist, post-colonialist and queer theory (Braidotti, 2006: 27) – sought to understand the material workings of power in social fields and to theorize resistance, it found the economic determinism of historical materialism insufficient to critique satisfactorily patriarchy, misogyny and homophobia, and rationalism, science and modernism, or to supply a critical and radical stance to underpin struggles for social justice and plurality (Bonnell and Hunt, 1999: 8; Braidotti, 2006: 24–25; Game, 1991: 12). Instead, theorists working in this perspective re-imagined class, gender, social organizations and bodies in terms of human culture and textuality (Friedland and Mohr, 2004: 2), providing new perspectives on power, resistance and social identity (Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1980; Henriques et al., 1998).

This post-structuralist trend has been criticized by some for privileging textuality and cultural interpretation within the sociological imagination, at the expense of matter and materiality (Bonnell and Hunt, 1999: 9; Rojek and Turner, 2000: 639–640). The ‘new’ materialisms that have subsequently emerged within the social sciences and humanities are thus in part a reaction against this textualization of the social world. However, some new materialist approaches have retained insights from post-structuralism concerning power, culture and social action, while resisting longings for sociology’s earlier reductionist materialism. However, the new materialism radically extends the scope of materialist analysis beyond both traditional concerns with structural and ‘macro’ level social phenomena (van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2010: 159) and post-structuralism’s concern with construction (Coole and Frost, 2010: 7; Taylor and Ivinson, 2013: 666). It addresses issues such as identity, interpersonal relations or sexuality, often regarded as the remit of micro-sociology because of their concern with how thoughts, desires, feelings and abstract concepts contribute to the social world (Braidotti, 2000: 159; DeLanda, 2006: 5).

Why a new materialist sociology?

In our view, there are a number of key reasons why the new materialisms offer opportunities for sociology, and we want to set these out now, though we will revisit this question throughout the book.

First is the emphasis that new materialists place upon ontology (concern with the kinds of things that exist) rather than epistemology (which addresses how these things can be known by an observer). Historically, sociology stepped away from ontological concerns, to focus upon how knowledge of the social world may be gained (De Castro, 2004: 283–4). The debates over whether it is possible to know a social world beyond human constructs (or even if there is such a world independent of human thought) has divided the sociological community, but has also contributed to barriers between quantitative and qualitative research approaches that appear to deal with different aspects of the social. New materialist scholars regard their own efforts to re-focus on ontology as a means to cut across an irresolvable argument between two self-contained belief systems (realism and idealism), but also as necessary to address assumptions about what matter is and what it does (Barad, 1996: 163, see also Karakayali, 2015).

Second, while there is some divergence across the new materialist terrain, the distinctive ontology advocated by new materialist scholars has been described as ‘flat’ or ‘monist’ (as opposed to ‘dualist’), rejecting differences between ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ realms, human and non-human, ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, micro and macro, and perhaps most significantly for sociology, mind and matter (van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2010). By challenging any distinction between the materiality of the physical world and the social constructs of human thoughts and desires, it opens up the possibility to explore how each affects the other, and how things other than humans (for instance, a tool, a technology or a building) can be social ‘agents’, making things happen. So sociology from a new materialist perspective would become ‘post-anthropocentric’ (Braidotti, 2011: 327), shifting humans from the central focus of sociological attention, and facilitating this ‘post-human’ sociology to engage productively with the world beyond the human: with other living things, and with the wider environment of matter and things.

New materialism’s flat ontology also marks the rejection of any sense of social structures (for instance, ‘patriarchy’, ‘neo-liberalism’ or ‘masculinity’) as ‘explanations’ of how societies and cultures work (Latour, 2005: 130). There are no structures, no systems and no mechanisms at work in new materialist ontology; instead there are ‘events’; an endless cascade of events comprising the material effects of both nature and culture that together produce the world and human history. Exploring the relational character of these events and their physical, biological and expressive composition becomes the means for sociology to explain the continuities, fluxes and ‘becomings’ that produce the world around us. We explore these issues in detail in Chapter 4.

Third, many of the leading new materialist scholars – notably feminists, post-colonial scholars and queer theorists – have developed or adopted their perspectives on the world because they are socially and politically engaged, and have sought a framework that is materially embedded and embodied (Braidotti, 2011: 128) – a perspective that is capable of use both to research the social world and to seek to change it for the better. While post-structuralism and social constructionism provided a means to break through top-down, determinist theories of power and social structure, the focus upon textuality, discourses and systems of thought in these approaches tended to create distance between theory and practice, and gave the sense that radical, interventionist critiques of inequities and oppressions were merely further constructions of the social world. The turn to matter offers a re-immersion in the materiality of life and struggle, and a recognition that in a monist world – because there is no ‘other level’ that makes things do what they do – everything is necessarily relational and contextual rather than essential and absolute.

These three reasons, in our view, supply the logic for why sociologists might choose to apply new materialism to both empirical research problems and to social theory. We find in the new materialisms – and in the scholarly work of new materialist social theorists, philosophers, feminists and posthumanists – a perspective on the social and the natural world, on social processes and on social identities that addresses key sociological questions. It offers a means to move beyond artificial divides in sociology between agency and social structure, culture and nature, mind and matter, human and non-human, power and resistance, continuity and change, reason and emotion that have constrained both social understanding and the sociological imagination.

Exploring the consequences of a monistic, materialist ontology will be the central theme throughout the book, from our questioning of an opposition between humans and their environment in Chapter 3; our rehabilitation of emotions as productive of social life (Chapter 7); and our re-making in Chapter 9 of issues of epistemology in social research. Our intention is to provide a critical overview of the application of the new materialisms within social science research and scholarship (see Fox and Alldred, 2014 for a review of pathfinder new materialist social science), in order to assess what these social theory developments mean when translated from social philosophy into sociological usage and into empirical social inquiry.

New materialism offers a means to move beyond the anthropocentrism that takes the human as the measure of all things, and allows us to take a fresh look at the ways in which the non-human has important and pervasive effects – on a daily basis – upon the social world and o...