Main points of New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (2010)
New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics is a foundational collection that marks a decisive shift in contemporary theory:
from language-centered critique to matter-centered thinking, without returning to naïve realism.
Edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, the volume gathers thinkers such as Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, and Manuel DeLanda.
Below is a clean map of its core arguments, organized around the three axes named in the title.
1. Ontology:
Matter is active, not inert
Key claim
Matter is not a passive substrate awaiting human meaning.
It is processual, relational, and generative.
What this overturns
- ❌ Cartesian dualism (mind vs. matter)
- ❌ Social constructionism that treats matter as mute
- ❌ Human exceptionalism
What replaces it
- Relational ontology: entities exist through relations, not prior to them
- Process ontology: stability is temporary; becoming is primary
- Flat ontology: humans are not ontologically privileged
Barad’s contribution reframes being itself as intra-action rather than interaction—relations come first; relata emerge later.
2. Agency:
Agency without intention
Key claim
Agency does not belong exclusively to humans, subjects, or intentions.
Instead, agency is:
- distributed
- emergent
- material-semiotic
Examples
- Metals fatigue and break
- Viruses mutate and reorganize ecologies
- Technologies shape habits and perception
- Climates condition politics before ideas do
Bennett calls this “vibrant matter”—not metaphorically alive, but efficacious.
Agency = the capacity to make a difference, not the capacity to mean.
3. Politics:
From discourse to material conditions
Key claim
Politics must attend to bodies, infrastructures, ecologies, and nonhuman actors, not only representations.
Political shifts proposed
- From ideology → material arrangements
- From sovereignty → assemblages
- From rights-only frameworks → ecological entanglements
This reorients political responsibility:
- not only who decides
- but what configurations enable or constrain action
Think power grids, food systems, hormones, weapons, waste, algorithms.
4. Assemblage thinking (DeLanda’s axis)
Social phenomena are:
- not totalities
- not expressions of a single logic
- but assemblages of heterogeneous elements
Each assemblage has:
- variable stability
- thresholds
- tipping points
This allows politics without totalization and critique without paranoia.
5. Ethics:
Accountability without mastery
Especially in Barad’s work:
- Ethics is ontological
- Responsibility arises because we are part of what we study and alter
- There is no outside position
We are responsible not because we control outcomes,
but because we are entangled in their becoming.
6. What New Materialism is
against
- Linguistic reductionism
- Pure textualism
- Voluntarist politics (“if we change minds, matter will follow”)
- The fantasy of human autonomy
7. In one schematic contrast
|
Old paradigm |
New Materialisms |
|
Matter = passive |
Matter = active |
|
Agency = human |
Agency = distributed |
|
Politics = discourse |
Politics = material assemblages |
|
Ethics = choice |
Ethics = entanglement |
|
Critique = debunking |
Critique = reconfiguration |
8. Why it resonates with
your
trajectory
Without saying it explicitly, this book gestures toward what you call:
物的反撲，人的退位；
物的歸位，人的復位
New Materialism does not erase the human.
It relocates the human—no longer sovereign, but answerable.
Not the end of ethics.
The end of human monopoly over meaning.
One sentence takeaway
New Materialism asks us to think, act, and take responsibility in a world where matter is no longer silent, humans are no longer central, and politics begins before intention.
If you wish, next we can:
- map New Materialism vs Heidegger vs Deleuze
- connect it directly to post-psychoanalysis
- or write a short “field guide” version for your seminar audience
