Paradigms change not with a bang but a whimper. This is certainly the case for the rise of neo-materialism: it was not a sudden switch away from the linguistic turn, but a gradual process that gathered momentum as it went along. At the centre of this process of change stands, for me, the monistic vital materialism of Deleuze’s philosophy, which had been relatively side-lined for decades. In spite of Foucault’s prediction that one day the century will be Deleuzian, vintage Deleuzians were not at all sure what century that might be. By the late 1990s, however, the emphasis on rational and transcendental consciousness- one of the pillars of anthropocentric humanism – was counter-acted by widespread acceptance of a grounded neo-Spinozist relational vision of the subject. Interest in linguistic and semiotic processes of representation began to wane, and increasing attention paid to concepts like radical immanence, materialism, affectivity, vital politics and post-anthropocentrism. Nomadic feminist theory had built on the concept of ‘bodily materialism’ since the late 1980’s, but by the new millennium a consensus was reached about the need to re-think the material structures of the human in ways that disengaged it from the notion of any one originary representational matrix, be it logocentrism, phallocentrism, or the dialectics of recognition by way of a constitutive abstraction called ‘the other’. Dialectics gave way to rhizomatics and process ontologies, not only through Deleuze, but also with Whitehead, Wittgenstein and others.
This change of framework does not constitute a drastic departure from the past, but it does enact a radical re-examination of conceptual and methodological priorities. For instance, the notion of embodiment is redefined on the basis of Deleuze’s re-reading of Spinozist monism. Feminist neo-materialism stresses the sexualized nature and the radical immanence of power relations that frame the subject as an embedded and embodied, affective and relational entity. Power is redefined as a complex strategic situation that is not only negative or confining (potestas), but also affirmative or productive (potentia): entrapment and empowerment as two interrelated facets of the same process of entanglement with power.
The shift to a monistic ontology prompted by a return to Spinozist philosophy, results also in overcoming the classical opposition between materialism & idealism, moving instead toward a dynamic brand of ‘materialist vitalism’, ‘vibrant matter’ or relational vital politics. These notions are premised on the idea that matter, including the specific slice of matter that is human embodiment, is intelligent, sexed and self-organizing and, moreover, it is also technologically mediated. As Kirby suggests: there is no such thing as “originary humanicity”.
A materially embedded and embodied, affective and relational approach redefines old binary oppositions, such as nature/culture and human/non-human, and therefore paves the way for a non-hierarchical and more egalitarian relationship to and between the species. This introduces an inclusive post-anthropocentric vision of subjectivity that includes non-human agents. There is a link therefore between neo- materialist vital systems and the displacement of anthropocentrism, that is to say the opening of posthuman perspectives within a monistic ontology.
The posthuman turn is based on the convergence of post-humanism with post-anthropocentrism. The former critiques the universalist posture of the idea of ‘Man’ as the alleged ‘measure of all things’, the latter criticizes species hierarchy and the assumption of human exceptionalism. Although posthuman critical theory benefits from multiple genealogical sources and cannot be reduced to a single or linear event, it crystallizes around neo-materialist conceptual premises, rhizomatic methods and the relation to the non-human(s). New discourses about human/non-human interaction with both animal and technological others emerge as the result of critical reconsiderations of what counts as the “matter” for materialist critical thought, or ‘matter-realist’ feminist theory.
Eco-feminists had already pioneered materialist environmental politics in terms of vegetarian and animal rights activism and geo-centred perspectives, but now they evolve into posthuman ethics and radical vegan activism. Today, queer science studies propose trans-corporeal porous boundaries between human and non-humans and between what Hayward calls “transspeciated selves”. These radical post-anthropocentric theories make the most of monistic ontology and argue for absolute species equality, adding renewed energy to the eco-feminist queer agenda.
The political implications are significant, considering the techno-scientific structure of the contemporary global economy. This rests on the convergence between previously differentiated branches of technology, notably nanotechnology, biotechnology; information technology and cognitive science. This techno-scientific economy involves research and intervention upon animals, seeds, cells and plants, as well as humans, meaning that advanced capitalism both invests and profits from the scientific and economic control and the commodification of all that lives. What constitutes capital value today is the informational power of living matter itself, transposed into banks of bio-genetic, neural and mediatic data that translate bounded entities and bodies into their vital substrate, in terms of energy resources, vital capacities or genetic dispositions. “Data-mining” includes profiling processes that identify different types or characteristics, highlighting them as strategic targets for capital investments, or as risk categories.
The capitalization of living matter produces a new political bio-economy, which Melinda Cooper calls “Life as surplus.” It introduces discursive and material techniques of population control that differ from the administration of demographics, which preoccupied Foucault’s work on bio-political governmentality. Today, we are undertaking “risk analyses” not only of entire social and national systems, but also of whole sections of the population in the global society. The fact that informational data is the true capital today produces a paradoxical form of post-anthropocentrism on the part of market forces, which trade on Life itself, given that Life is not the exclusive prerogative of humans. Thus, the opportunistic profit-bound economy of bio-genetic capitalism blurs the distinction between the human and other species: seeds, plants, animals and bacteria fit into this logic of commodified consumption, alongside various substrate of the human organism, thereby displacing the uniqueness of Anthropos. For instance: genetically modified vegetables, plants and animal organisms are as much a reality as the Human Genome Project. Major transnational companies like Monsanto have issued patents to certify their ownership of the genetic lines of seeds and grains, thereby turning these formerly ‘natural’ entities into private property. Environmental activists like Vandana Shiva refer to these practices as ‘bio-piracy’. Another telling example comes from our robotics industry, which in cooperation with cognitive sciences is working on cloning various sensorial and neural faculties and capacities. In order to do so, they are cloning the senses of many animal species as well as the humans. Thus, the scent of dogs, the radar of bats and the sonar of dolphins is as highly valued as human vision and manual dexterity. If you grade the species not according to an anthropocentric hierarchy of beings, but in terms of their actual abilities, a sort of bio-egalitarianism emerges. Advanced economies have understood this basic notion – taking the turn towards cognitive capitalism, but they subject it to the political economy of profit, thereby recoding it negatively.
The posthuman turn occurs within such a context, but in the critical version I defend it opposes the political economy of advanced capitalism. The critical mode is also compounded by growing public awareness of and anxiety about the climate change issue in the era known as the ‘Anthropocene’. While the literature about extinction and the spectacle of disaster rise in popularity, monistic neo-materialist theories develop in the direction of a more productive “eco-sophical approach”. This was pioneered by Guattari and it works out the ethical implications of monistic ontology and the nature-cultural continuum for a better understanding of the complex interaction of social, psychic and natural factors in the construction of multiple ecologies of belonging. In other words, a vital materialist approach makes it impossible to separate ecological degradation from human activity, social interaction and mental habits: it all hangs eco-sophically together. Not only is human subjectivity re-defined as an expanded relational self, which includes non-human others, but it also allows us to open up to the vital force of Life - which is what I have coded as zoe. Zoe-centred egalitarianism is the ethical core of the critical posthuman turn: it is a materialist, secular, and generative response to the opportunistic trans-species commodification of Life that is the logic of advanced capitalism, which Haraway recently labeled as “capitalocene.”
In this context, the emergence of neo-materialism marks a new alliance between the ‘two cultures’ of the humanities and the sciences. The monistic understanding of ‘Life’ as a symbiotic system of co-dependence alters the terms of the nature-culture debate and of human interaction with what used to be called “matter”, which now can be approached as the continuum of a self-organizing vital system. Starting from such premises, neo-materialist theory moves away from the social constructivist methods and the deconstructive political strategies of post-structuralism, to embrace differential becoming and the actualization of transversal alliances.
Materialist vitalist feminism, resting on a dynamic monistic political ontology, redefines the body as an incorporeal complex assemblage of virtualities that encompasses sexuality as a constitutive element: one is always already sexed. A post-anthropocentric feminist approach makes it clear that bodily matter in the human as in other species is always already sexed and hence sexually differentiated along the axes of multiplicity and heterogeneity. Sexuality is conceptualized as a generative ontological force that involves both human and non-human agents. As such it cannot be adequately contained within the dichotomous view of gender defined as the social construction of differences between the sexes, but is rather capable of deterritorializing gender identity and institutions.
In terms of feminist politics, this means we need to rethink sexuality without genders, starting from a vitalist return to the polymorphous and, according to Freud “perverse” (in the sense of playful and non-reproductive) structure of human sexuality. We also need to reassess the generative powers of female embodiment, which have not been sufficiently appraised by feminists. In this vital neo-materialist feminist approach, gender is just a historically contingent binary mechanism of capture of the multiple potentialities of the body, including their generative or reproductive capacities. To turn this historically contingent capture apparatus of gender into the trans-historical matrix of power, as suggested by queer theory in the linguistic and social constructivist tradition (Butler, 1991), is quite simply a conceptual error. Sexuality may be caught in the sex-gender binary, but is not reducible to it. The mechanism of capture does not alter the fact that sexuality carries transversal, structural and vital connotations, both for humans and non-humans. As life-force, sexuality provides a non-essentialist ontological structure for the organization of human affectivity and desire. By extension, a social constructivist account confines itself to the description of a sociological process of bounded identity formation, missing the point about the in/depth structure of sexuality. The neo-materialist monistic counter-argument is that sexuality is both post and pre- identity; it is a constitutive force that is always already present and hence prior to gender, though it intersects with it in constructing disciplined and functional subjects in the binary social regime of bio-political governamentality.
In other words, for posthuman monistic feminists, gender is a form of governance that has to be disrupted by processes of becoming-minoritarian/becoming-woman/becoming-animal, becoming imperceptible (Braidotti, 2006). They are the transformative counter-actualisations of the multiple, always-already sexed bodies we may be capable of becoming. Monism makes for a thousand plateaus of sexed bio and zoo-diversities. In other words, we need to experiment with multiple intensities – within an understanding of life as Zoe, i.e. non-human - in order to find out what posthuman sexed bodies are capable of becoming. Because the phallocentric gender system captures the complexity of human sexuality in a binary machinery that privileges heterosexual family formations and literally steals all other possible bodies from us, we no longer know what our sexed bodies can do. We therefore need to rediscover the notion of the relational complexity that marks sexuality in its human, non-human and posthuman forms.
These affirmative experiments with what sexed bodies can do and become, however, do not amount to saying that the struggle for political emancipation and equal rights is over. In the globalized economy, new social relations of exclusion and marginalization have perpetuated traditional power relations and reiterated pejorative differences. On a geo-political scale, extreme forms of polarized sexual and gender difference are played against each other, creating belligerent gendered visions of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between the West and the rest, that is allegedly predicated in terms of women’s and LGBT people’s rights. Sexual nationalism has become a pawn in contemporary international relations and a central concern for feminist and queer politics.
Politically, monistic neo-materialism produces a different scheme of activism and a non-dialectical politics of human and posthuman liberation. It assumes that political agency need not be critical in the negative sense of dialectical oppositions but rely instead on affirmation and the pursuit of counter-actualizations of the virtual. An activist embrace of zoe introduces a planetary dimension that involves not only continuous negotiations with dominant norms and values, but also the politics of co-production of affirmative and sustainable alternatives.
A materialist politics of posthuman differences works by potential becomings that call for actualization. It is immanent and pragmatic, though it often expresses itself in complicated language. The becoming-minor or nomadic is a counter-actualization in that it strives to sustain processes of subject-formation that do not comply with the dominant norms. These counter-subjectivities are enacted through a collectively shared praxis and support the process of re-composition of what is not yet there - a “missing people” (Deleuze). Composing a community around the shared affects and concepts of becoming-minoritarian is the key to nomadic transformative politics. It expresses the affirmative, ethical dimension of becoming-posthuman as a gesture of collective self-styling, or mutual specification. It actualizes a community that is not bound negatively by shared vulnerability, the guilt of ancestral communal violence, or the melancholia of unpayable ontological debts, but rather by the compassionate acknowledgment of their interdependence with multiple others most of which, in the age of Anthropocene, are quite simply not anthropomorphic.
This materialist shift of perspective towards a zoe or geo-centered approach requires a mutation of our shared understanding of what it means to be human, qualified by grounded analyses of continuing power relations and racialized inequalities. The displacement of the centrality of human agency through network systems and ubiquitous technological mediation must also account for the shortcomings of economic globalization and its structural injustices, including increasing indebtedness. The “global obscenities” of an economic system that relies on what Shiva calls “bio-piracy” also engenders a “necro-political” governmentality through technologically mediated wars and counter-terrorism.
Ever-mindful of the fact that, the ‘human’ is not a neutral term but rather one that indexes access to privileges and entitlements, we should not mistake the ‘posthuman’ as being beyond power. Nomadic politics of affirmation require instead new assemblages or transversal alliances to be negotiated carefully, as a form of materialist praxis. Starting from philosophies of radical immanence, vital materialism and the feminist politics of locations, I would also argue against recreating an abstract idea of a “new” pan-humanity, bonded in shared vulnerability or in species supremacy. What we need instead is embedded and embodied, relational and affective cartographies of the new power relations that are emerging from the current geo-political and post-anthropocentric order. Class, race, gender and sexual orientations, age and able-bodiedness are more than ever significant markers of what we call ‘human’. The shift of perspective towards a zoe or geo-centred perspective requires a mutation of our shared understanding of what it means to become posthuman, which however needs to be qualified by grounded analyses of power relations and inequalities. The posthuman path is neither unitary nor linear; there may well be multiple and potentially contradictory projects at stake in becoming-posthuman right now.
