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Ontologized Agency and Political Critique
Although wide-ranging in their aspects and concerns, 'new materialist' approaches in feminist and political theory share a commitment to trouble binaries central to humanist inquiry, for example sensuous/ideal, natural/artificial, subject/object.1 In distinction from an 'old materialism' rooted in Marxian critiques of idealism and continuing that tradition's humanist bent, the new materialisms underscore a need to reconceptualize matter: nature, in both its animate and inanimate guises, but also the apparatuses, artifacts and other objects that are produced by and productive of human capacities, and indeed of the world itself. In so doing, these approaches compel a rethinking of the boundary between human and nonhuman. At stake is the claim that such reconceptualizations can clarify our ethical imperatives and political possibilities: a recognition that matter is not the passive receptacle or recipient of human agency, which is in turn neither sovereign nor unified, conditions a post-humanist perspective said to promote generosity, responsibility, and/or receptiveness to difference.2
From the perspective of an earlier materialism, by contrast, where exploitation and oppression happen to 'species-beings' rather than being enacted through such biologistic distinctions, political and ethical critique hinges on a human/nonhuman divide. The curious commodity that is labor power, for example, or the conundrums of commodity fetishism and alienated labor, are demystified - and the capitalist system perpetuating them is exposed as de humanizing - through analyses that traffic heavily in the binaries now being questioned. In that earlier context, subjects appeared as makers of their own history (although of course not 'just as they please[d]' (Marx, 1996, p. 32), objectivity was accorded both to social structures and to historical materialist analyses of them, and the power of 'things' was more likely to be linked to their reification than to an inhering vibrancy.
Pursuing a thorough investigation of the differences between these interpretive paradigms is well beyond the scope of our essay. But we begin by contrasting them in order to highlight the perhaps paradoxical role that metaphysics plays in materialisms: whether a subject/object binary is taken to be consistent with 'fundamental reality', or whether it is taken to be fundamentally misrepresentative of that reality, affects how matter will be said to matter. Such metaphysical investments are in turn tied to the exigencies...