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Official Gospel of 'New Materialism' |
I’m
at Northwestern Uni, Illinois, where I’ve been asked to address the Latest
Trendy Thing Classics has borrowed from other disciplines: ‘New Materialism’. New Materialism says inanimate things have
agency. Humans oppress things. The trendiest New Materialist, Jane Bennett, wants
‘to counter the narcissistic reflex of human language and thought.’ She thinks
Matter needs to be discussed without thinking (yawn!) about ‘human labour and
the socioeconomic entities made by men and women using raw materials’.
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Prof. Bennett, Johns Hopkins Pol. Sci. |
Old
Materialists like me are obsolete narcissists, cosmic imperialists who oppress
inorganic elements, minerals, liquids, and gases as well as organic flora and
fauna. Bennett goes directly for the jugular of Marxism-influenced thought: ‘Is
there a form of theory that can acknowledge a certain ‘thing-power’, that is,
the irreducibility of objects to the human meanings or agendas they also
embody?’
Please.
The idea that academia been too focused on thinking about labour is
preposterous. Only a scholar working in a country like the USA, where only
about 20% of the workforce is engaged in agriculture or industry, the other 80%
operating at a more or less extreme degree of alienation from the processes of
material production, could possibly hold such an opinion. But try claiming that
we are too focused on labour and the socio-economy to a citizen of Zambia or of Burundi,
where the percentage of the workforce labouring in agriculture or industry is 96%.
Globally, 40% of the workforce still works in farming, often at subsistence
level in grinding poverty. Every year sees an increase in the number of humans involved in industrial labour.
New
Materialists are Virtue Signallers who argue that they occupy higher moral ground
than the rest of us anthropocentric narcissists. But Classicists—Be Warned! Ancient
society, in terms of its relations of production, was far more similar to modern
Burundi than to the UK or USA. If we are to understand the role of materials
and objects in a play written in 458 BCE in Athens, then we would be well
advised to ask how those materials were thought about in that society by—er,
humans—as well as their ‘vitality’ or ‘thing-power’.



[This is a summary of an article soon to appear in Melissa
Mueller & Mario Telò (eds.) The
Materialities of Greek Tragedy. Bloomsbury].
Good read; another is Sarah Bond,
ReplyDelete"Purple, Indigo, And The Slave Labor That Produced Expensive Dyes"
https://sarahemilybond.com/2017/10/24/purple-indigo-and-the-slave-labor-that-produced-expensive-dyes/
Apart from the craziness of the theory I really enjoyed the contruction of your argument dismissing it. Thanks.
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