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New Materialism and Speculative Materialism are two contemporary philosophical movements that rethink traditional materialist approaches, moving beyond mechanistic and reductionist views of matter, while addressing questions of agency, ontology, and reality. Although related in their critique of older materialisms, they are distinct in their methods and areas of focus.
1. New Materialism:
New Materialism emerged in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as a response to traditional materialist frameworks, which were often viewed as overly deterministic and reductionist. Traditional materialism generally views matter as inert and passive, governed by external forces. New Materialism seeks to challenge this by emphasizing the agency, dynamism, and complexity of matter itself.
Key Concepts:
• Matter as Active: New Materialists view matter as having agency and vitality. Instead of being passive or inert, matter is seen as dynamic, self-organizing, and capable of affecting change. This perspective is influenced by thinkers like Gilles Deleuze and Donna Haraway, who emphasize relational ontologies and complex systems.
• Posthumanism: New Materialism is often linked to posthumanist critiques of anthropocentrism. It moves beyond seeing humans as the central agents in the world and considers the entanglements between human and nonhuman actors—such as animals, ecosystems, and technology.
• Feminist Influences: Thinkers like Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti have contributed significantly to New Materialism by integrating feminist theory with materialist philosophy. Barad’s agential realism emphasizes how matter and meaning are co-constituted, rejecting a simple distinction between objects and subjects.
Significance: New Materialism offers a way to rethink relationships between humans, the environment, and nonhuman entities in a way that reflects the interdependency and complexity of our world. It challenges the anthropocentric and mechanistic frameworks that have dominated Western thought, especially in areas like ecology, politics, and technology.
2. Speculative Materialism:
Speculative Materialism is closely tied to Speculative Realism, a philosophical movement that emerged in the early 21st century, led by philosophers like Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, and Graham Harman. It challenges the post-Kantian tradition, which argues that humans cannot access the “real” world beyond our subjective experience. Speculative Materialists argue that reality exists independently of human thought and that philosophy must engage with this reality.
Key Concepts:
• Rejection of Correlationism: Meillassoux coined the term correlationism to describe the belief that we can only know the relationship between thought and the world, but not the world itself as it is “in itself.” Speculative Materialists reject this, asserting that there is an objective reality that exists independently of human perception.
• Necessity of Contingency: Meillassoux argues for the radical contingency of all things. Unlike traditional materialists who believe in fixed laws of nature, Meillassoux claims that everything could be otherwise, and that there are no necessary laws governing reality—only contingent ones that might change.
• Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO): Some philosophers within Speculative Realism, like Graham Harman, develop object-oriented ontology, which emphasizes that all objects (whether human, nonhuman, material, or immaterial) exist in their own right and have their own reality, independently of human thought or perception.
Significance: Speculative Materialism challenges the anthropocentric limits of modern philosophy and reopens metaphysical questions about the nature of reality. It has implications for science, ethics, and metaphysics by encouraging philosophers to think beyond the limits of human thought and to engage with a more radical, speculative understanding of the universe. By doing so, it seeks to escape the constraints of correlationism and to offer a new vision of materialism that embraces the unknowability and contingency of the world.
Key Differences:
• New Materialism focuses on matter’s agency and vitality, often with an emphasis on ecology, gender, and nonhuman actors, whereas Speculative Materialism focuses on the independence of reality from human perception, engaging more with metaphysical questions about the structure and nature of reality itself.
• New Materialism often overlaps with feminist and posthumanist concerns, while Speculative Materialism is more directly engaged with metaphysical and ontological questions stemming from critiques of Kantian philosophy.
Conclusion:
Both movements are significant because they offer alternatives to traditional materialism and the limitations of human-centered thought. New Materialism reconfigures our understanding of agency and materiality in a world that is ecologically and technologically entangled, while Speculative Materialism provides a radical challenge to the limitations of modern philosophy’s engagement with reality, pushing us to think about a world that exists beyond human perception.
