Spinoza, New Materialism and the Contemporary 1137502320, 9781137502322

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Spinoza, New Materialism and the Contemporary Kimberly DeFazio

Spinoza, New Materialism and the Contemporary

Kimberly DeFazio

Spinoza, New Materialism and the Contemporary

Kimberly DeFazio University of Wisconsin-La Crosse La Crosse, WI, USA

ISBN 978-1-349-69944-5 ISBN 978-1-137-50232-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50232-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2025 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature America, Inc. The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A. If disposing of this product, please recycle the paper.

To my Mother and her critique-al support that have directed me to new ways of knowing and unretracting activism, and to my Father for his enduring love and support.

Preface

New Materialism has declared itself a theoretical insurgency against the linguistic turn, its epistemology and theotextuality that have barred the analysis of such world-making issues as ecology. “Everywhere we look…we are witnessing scattered but insistent demands for more materialist modes of analysis and for new ways of thinking about matter and processes of materialization,” Diana Coole and Samantha Frost write, “particularly in light of [the textual and cultural turns’] most urgent challenges regarding environment, demographic geopolitical, and economic change” (“Introducing the New Materialisms” 2–3). In a different but related new materialist tendency, Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz, in calling for a new “ecological class” to confront environmental crises and the need for “materialist” analysis, insist, “But here’s the thing: it’s no longer the same materiality!”, which requires new concepts to address the new realities (On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo, emphasis in original 11). New materialism puts itself forward as a conceptual breakthrough that by innovative concepts has transformed the contemporary ways of understanding the world and brought bold perspective to social and cultural sciences. In this book, I ask when and how philosophical innovations become urgent matters and within that analytics raise a second question—how innovative are the innovations of new materialism and what are they innovation in. My goal is not the traditional debunking of their claims

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to newness—in the capitalist culture industry every new philosophical commodity is advertised as “new.” Therefore, although I discuss, often at great length, the fundamental concepts of new materialism and its specific analytical moves and their genealogies in the thought of such thinkers as Spinoza, Gille Deleuze, Latour, Antonio Negri, Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Jacques Derrida,…., my main argument in this book is that new materialism is not a conceptual innovation, an intellectual breakthrough or an interpretive leap forward but a “new” response to the emerging contradictions of capitalism. They are indeed bold innovations in the ways they contain these contradictions and normalize the emerging forms of exploitation in cognitive capitalism. New materialism is, to say it differently, a philosophical normalization of the economic needs of capital. In my analysis of new materialism and its conceptual structure, however, I have a broader purpose which is to argue, through critique of new materialist concepts such as vitality of matter, intra-action, federated agency, flat ontology and affiliated notions of actor-network theory, speculative realism, that philosophical innovations, although they have a discursive form and a conceptual scaffolding, are never conceptual or innovative. Rather they are tropic legitimization of emerging economic needs of the contemporary form of capitalism. This is a bold reduction but bold reductions (actually reductions of any kind) are the very conditions of change of the way world is understood and acted on. The outcome of reductions is, like the outcome of class struggles (a reduction of the social to two great classes (Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party)), not predetermined: “each time” they end “either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes” (482). Writing a book such as this, in other words, is taking a risk… I am taking the risk. La Crosse, WI, USA

Kimberly DeFazio

PREFACE

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References Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost, eds. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2010. Latour, Bruno and Nikolaj Schultz. On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo. Translated by Julie Rose, Polity, 2023. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. In Collected Works. Vol. 6. New York: International Publishers, 1976, pp. 477–519.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my mother, Leslie Hudson, who throughout many years has given critique-al support to my writing and activism. Her own thoughtful, bold and example-setting activism, and profound love, has sustained me during difficult times when I have encountered multiple forms of institutional marginalization and outright suppression. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers who have reviewed the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions for revisions and rewriting. My comrades in The Red Collective have been instrumental not only in my completing this book but in all my activities. An earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared as “The Spectral Ontology and Miraculous Materialism” in The Red Critique. An earlier version of Chapter 5 was published in Human, All Too (Post)Human (“The Commune, Not the Common”), edited by Jeniffer Cotter, et al., by Lexington Books (2016). I am thankful to the editors of these publications for permission to republish.

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Contents

Note on Translations and Abbreviations

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Left Spinozism and the Metaphysics of Democracy

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The Orphan of History, the Left Hermeneutic and Self-Relating Substance

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Something Has Happened to Ontology: Contingency, Immanence and Conatus

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The New (New) Materialism: Materialism with a Green Aroma

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The Vibrating Pixel: Negri, Potentia and the Commonbeing of Biomaterialism

Index

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Note on Translations and Abbreviations

Citations of Spinoza’s writings are from Edwin Curley’s translations in The Collected Works of Spinoza (Princeton University Press). I also use Curley’s system of abbreviations, according to which: E = Ethics TP = Political Treatise (Tractatus politicus) TTP = Theological-Political Treatise (Tractatus theologico-politicus, and references to the Ethics make use of the following abbreviations: Roman numeral = part A = axiom D (following Roman numeral) = definition D (following an Arabic numeral) = demonstration P = proposition C = corollary S = scholium. In referencing the Political Treatise and the Theological-Political Treatise, chapter and paragraph numbers are instead included. (See pages xix ff in Volume I and Volume II of Curley’s Collected Works.) However, breaking from the notational convention, I also include the page number after a coma following the abbreviation. Thus: E IP14D, 420 = Ethics, Part I, Proposition 14, Demonstration, page 420 TP ii, 17, 514 = Political Treatise, Chapter 2, paragraph 17, page 514. xv

CHAPTER 1

Left Spinozism and the Metaphysics of Democracy

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Spinoza’s metaphysics of substance is at the heart of the contemporary new materialism that has become the dominant interpretive analytics in the humanities after the fading of poststructuralism. In fact, “Spinoza, and most of all the Spinoza of the Ethics ,” Rick Dolphijin and Iris van der Tuin write, “might very well be considered the first (and foremost) new materialist” (Cartographies 151). For new materialists, Spinoza offers a post-anthropocentric way of grasping “the lively immanence of matter” (Coole and Frost, New Materialisms 9) and what Jane Bennett calls a “faith” in that everything is part of one substance (Vibrant Matter x), on the one hand, and, on the other, a much needed attention to bodies and their affective agency as a means, it is claimed, of responding to contemporary crises of climate change, deepening inequality alongside technological advances, and eroding democratic institutions. Spinoza, as Dimitris Vardoulakis, puts it, “has emerged as a figure who allows us to think of our contemporary situation” (Spinoza Now xi). I argue in this book, however, that Spinoza has become a “decoy” philosopher for the left. The left critics and theorists have deployed his ideas (formed by his own times and his own commercial ties) to represent his regressive materialism as innovative, pioneering thoughts. Warren Montag, for instance, argues that Spinoza’s famous expression “Deus, sive Natura” (God, or Nature) is the basis of a “revolutionary” mode of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature America, Inc. 2025 K. DeFazio, Spinoza, New Materialism and the Contemporary, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50232-2_1

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materialism which “leav[es] us with a purely material world of bodies and their forces, a world in which bodies are moved by other bodies, a purely material world of force against force” (Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries xx). In the dominant readings of Spinoza, left theory has substituted a materialism of objects and bodies (legacies of the matterism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) for the materialism of relations. Through this displacement, what comes to matter are (non)human bodies and objects and their interactions, while the historical relations that shape them and their “forces” are themselves subsumed into object relations. Which is another way of saying that the materialism of objects disappears the social relations of production that have relentlessly transformed all social life into the relations of exchange and subordinated people’s needs to the accumulation of profit. It, in effect, erases the social agency by which these relations are transformed. This regressive materialism has been represented as a ground-breaking advancement in materialism. My reading of Spinoza is part of a counter tradition, historical materialism, which has been dismantled and displaced in the contemporary moment in large part by the post-1968 speculative trends in EuroAmerican Left thought that I discuss in the book. In significant ways, Spinoza—and more precisely, left interpretations of Spinoza—have been at the heart of these trends. I call these readings of Spinoza Left Spinozism to place them in the same ideological genealogies of Marx’s critique of the “left Hegelians,” who, in the name of bringing Hegel down to earth, merely updated spiritualism (The German Ideology). My book, in other words, is essentially about a class war in philosophy. Who is Spinoza? There is, I argue, not one Spinoza but two: Spinoza as Marx reads him, and Spinoza as the para-Marxists interpret him. Spinoza, New Materialism and the Contemporary is an anatomy of some of the Left Spinozist main tendencies as they are developed in such writers as Gilles Deleuze, Louis Althusser, Antonio Negri, and Warren Montag, and especially as they are re-articulated in the recent new materialist or ontological turn, in writers like Jane Bennett, Graham Harman, Rosi Braidotti, Bruno Latour and their numerous followers whose essays and papers now fill the pages of scholarly journals and conferences. In these discourses—which now inform some of the most influential tendencies in the (post)humanities—things, objects, matter, bodies and affects take center stage, while the (social and historical) relations within which they develop and interact, are backgrounded—often in terms of a

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posthumanist re-orientation that displaces the human and that affirms with Spinoza that humans are not “a dominion within a dominion” (as Spinoza puts in in the Preface to Part III of the Ethics (491)) but subject with the rest of nonhuman life to, above all else, natural (physical, biological, chemical…) laws. The suspension of the “human” of course has nothing to do with humans. It is a ruse for the erasure of agency (as in people “make their own history” (Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire 103)). If, in other words, it is the case that “Spinoza studies has been a test case for canon change in the Anglosphere. Once nearly invisible, then a marginal figure and eventually a specialist interest among scholars of early modern European philosophy, Spinoza is now nearly everywhere in North American journals, conferences, and departments,” as Julie R. Klein observes (“Toward the Future of Spinoza Studies”), this is owing not to Spinoza’s explaining of the contemporary but to the manner in which he spectralizes and therefore un-explains it—a spectralizing through which the left in the Angloshere has normalized liberal capitalism in the global north. The world is remade through Spinoza as a flat ontology of things’ self-agency, by which is meant the “power” to “react” and “interact”— not agency as people “engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed” (Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire 103). On the flat plane of Spinozian being, whose “immanence” is said to nullify “teleology,” things interact in assemblages that operate outside of any “external” cause that could be said to historically determine phenomena or be subject to social agents of historical change. Far from making materialism “more” materialist, Left Spinozism is a ghost-al or, to be more sympathetic to their view, spiritual materialism, the spirit made earth(l)y matter in “substance.” This ghostly matter is made to appear (like Spinoza’s “substance”) as “self-causing” only by abstracting it from the totality of social relations of production. The undoing of “totality”—which articulates the underlying social logic—is of course one of the tasks of the new materialism which, like poststructuralism, emphasizes the capillary, the local and the regional “small” narratives cut off from the “grand narratives” of class relations, above all the grand narrative of “emancipation” from relations of exploitation (Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition xxiii–xxiv). In contrast to the dominant left interpretations of Spinoza and theorists of materialism today, I argue that materialism is materialism of relations. Materialism is not a materialism of matter. As Frederick Jameson

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argues, such a view of materialism as matter is essentially a bourgeois idea. Materialism is a relation and the relation is always and ultimately a relation of production in a mode of production. In other words, materialism is not static but dialectical. The “grounding of materialism in one or another conception of matter,” Jameson writes, is “the hallmark of bourgeois ideology from the eighteenth-century materialisms all the way to nineteenth-century positivism and determinism (itself a bourgeois rather than a Marxian term and concept)” (Political Unconscious 45–46). Materialism in its most complex mode is, however, “not a mechanical but a historical materialism: it does not assert the primacy of matter so much as it insists on an ultimate determination by the mode of production” (Jameson 45–46). Materialism becomes part of a new philosophy in social struggles. In his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law Marx writes, “Philosophy cannot be made a reality without the abolition of the proletariat, the proletariat cannot be abolished without philosophy being made reality” (187). The materialism of relations is itself a product of changing material relations. It became possible to supersede the early materialism of objects and mechanical materialism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in other words, only “when it became possible to criticise the conditions of production and intercourse in the hitherto existing world, i.e., when the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat had given rise to communist and socialist views” (German Ideology 419). The earlier matterism, in which “things” interact with each other and which is developed by Spinozian metaphysics, is a relay of early bourgeois relations in which the conflict between capital and labor is emerging, and “agency” remains identified with the agency of capital hypostatized in ideal forms (“substance” and “matter”) devoid of history. One of the main features of this speculative treatment of matter is that “the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice” (“Theses on Feuerbach” 143). It is in this regard a metaphysics of capital. The contemporary discourses of the new materialist turn have aggressively opposed materialism of relations and substituted for it a materialism of matter (a matterism) that is a modern version of metaphysics. Metaphysics has, of course, been revived in new materialist discourses which take their lead from Deleuze’s “I am a pure metaphysician” (Collapse III 42). The substitution of objects for relations is evident not only in those theories that focus exclusively on objects and treat “relations” as

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“external” and that insist, as Graham Harman does, that “Everything is Not Connected” (Bells and Whistles: More Speculative Realism 110–127). Non-relational materialism is also at the core of the most relationalseeming materialisms: those focusing on assemblages (Latour), desiringmachines (Deleuze), entanglements (Karen Barad), meshes (Timothy Morton), etc. I say “relational-seeming” because what these theorists mean by relations are really local reactions and interactions of entities (more or less fluid and fleeting) with each other—a logic of objects (what Spinoza calls “singular things”) divorced from social relations. In compensation for their severance from the social world, all things, through Spinoza, are given an other-worldly significance and interconnection in the substance that is divine Nature itself: “in Nature there is only one substance” and “it is absolutely infinite” (EP14D, 420) from which follows the claim that “nothing can be or be conceived without God” (EP15D, 420). The object-al notion of relations is the logic of the commodity, which translates the social relations of production that produce commodities into relations between things. As with the commodity, it has great “allure,” what Harman, whose object-oriented ontology reduces the world to objects perhaps more aggressively than all the new materialists, argues involves an “enchanted experience” that “makes no attempt” to analyze “hidden” material relations of things (Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics 143). The allure of the materialism of objects is a response to neoliberalism, which has made it possible to “criticize” earlier forms of materialism and their contradictions from a “more materialist” standpoint—but the “more” is a speculative, spectral materialism that normalizes the economic relations of finance and translates working class passivity (itself a product of capital’s class power—ownership—and the left’s accommodation) into militant affective agency that ultimately calls for minor forms of redistribution. It is a substitute for collectivity (based on position in the division of labor), just as “assemblages” are a substitute for making sense of events as part of the social totality of capitalism and the dialectic of its transformation.

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Many Left Spinozists—following the enormous canon of Spinoza studies—have highlighted the now widely known aspects of Spinoza’s biography and his contribution to Western thought, addressing for

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instance the circumstances of the herem (excommunication) imposed on him in 1656, the rigor of Spinoza’s philosophical system and the differences with his contemporaries it manifests, his concern for community and democracy, his critique of theological and teleological ideology and the courage with which he advocated freedom of intellectual and religious inquiry and debate in an era in which he risked for doing so exile if not imprisonment, murder or execution. But, as with the more canonic and mainstream scholarly texts, in the left scholarship detailing such issues, Spinoza’s “heroism” has overshadowed serious critical materialist inquiry and analysis, with few exceptions. George Caffentzis likens the treatment of Spinoza among left and Marxian readers to the “great ideas” theory of history from which the left normally vigorously distances itself (“How Savage Was Spinoza?”). One result is that dominant left interpretations of Spinoza ignore the ways in which what Spinoza defended as democracy (the governing of “public Affairs” in a “Democracy,” Spinoza writes in the Political Treatise is the “responsibility” “of a Council made up of the common multitude” (ii, 17, 514)), is a democracy of the bourgeoisie. A democracy of political freedom, not economic freedom. Which is to say a political freedom that encodes the equal rights of all to own private property by which they exploit the labor of others. It is advocated by a progressive and often radical bourgeois class (especially relative to the feudal aristocrats), who in their fight against feudal and absolutist relations in the early stages of capitalism appealed to the working class to support political institutions advantageous to the bourgeoisie. This is essentially the class behind what Jonathan Israel calls “the Radical Enlightenment” thinkers (Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity: 1650–1750). But it is a class that nonetheless depended on the exploitation of free labor and enslaved labor of early modern capitalism. To put it another way, it is a class whose relative radicality lies in the way its members were advancing new forms of exploitation, in other words, a new mode of production—one based on the exchange of free labor for wages. Exploitation of free labor, or capital, “comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Marx, Capital I 926). These contradictory relations in reality produce what Étienne Balibar calls the “aporia” of Spinoza’s notion of community (Spinoza and Politics 113–124), “aporia” being one of the left’s favored concepts within which to absorb class contradictions in the philosophical language of “unresolvable” opposition.

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The Left Spinozists exalt Spinoza as a “radical” and even “revolutionary” defender of “democracy” as if his democracy was not the democracy of the bourgeoisie, and in doing so make reform of capitalism the limit of revolutionary change. They, in effect, ignore or actively obscure the way exploitation increasingly takes place over the modern era in the sphere of economic relations rather than imposed with brute force and political dictatorship—though brute force and political authoritarianism never disappears, even as the relations of free (wage) labor extend throughout the world. The immanence of the market is of course what Friedrich Hayek refers to as the most “efficient” and “noncoercive” method “by which our activities can be adjusted to each other with coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority” (Road to Serfdom 41). Its “freedom”—the illusion of immanence and political liberty—however is the economic unfreedom of the other. The other—the outside to capitalist relations—is the basis of a transformative materialism—not a matterism of objects but a materialism of relations. Political liberty is the name under which economic inequality is presented by the left and the right alike, in different idioms, as an absolute, as if “things could have been created […] in no other way or order” (E IP33S2, 437). The uncritical (often joyous) readings of Spinoza have had devastating consequences for the left and for the working class movement to transform private property relations, which is in part the focus of and reason for writing Spinoza, New Materialism and Contemporary.

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I have here focused on Spinoza because he has been deeply influential in formations of new materialism, including such tendencies as vibrant matter, object-oriented ontology, affect theory, speculative realism and assemblage theory, for instance. This book, however, is not a book about Spinoza. Nor is it a book primarily about “reading” Spinoza or “readings of” Spinoza, although it necessarily involves both. It is a book about new materialism and the way it has remapped the humanities. It engages Spinoza because, as I have already said, Spinoza’s thought has been used by the left to substitute a regressive materialism of objects for materialism of relations, a substitution which has normalized existing social relations. My concern here is not Spinoza or new materialism—although I engage both. I engage both because they have, in the name of materialism, turned materialism into a mode of latter-day spiritualism.

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My concern here is to offer, through analysis of texts by Spinoza and some of the new materialists’ writings, what is often dismissed in these discourses as a “grand narrative”: a materialist materialism the task of which, to say it through some of Marx’s words, is to clarify to itself the meaning of the struggles and desires of our time (Letter to Ruge 141– 145). It is through such a clarification that a path forward is constructed. The task of critical theory, I argue, is to contribute to social transformation through materialist analysis of what exists to “find the new world though criticism of the old” without being afraid of its own conclusions or the “powers that be” (142).

References Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010. Bryant, Levi R. “Knots: Notes for a Daemonic Naturalism.” Symplok¯e, Volume 24, Issue 1–2 (2016), pp. 27–45. https://doi.org/10.5250/symploke.24.12.0027. Caffentzis, George C. “How Savage Was Spinoza?” Reading Negri: Marxism in the Age of Empire, edited by Pierre Lamarche et al. Open Court, 2011, pp. 193–214. Coole, Diana H., and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press, 2010. De Spinoza, Benedict. Ethics. Translated by Edwin Curley, Penguin Classics, 2015. Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin, eds. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Open Humanities Press, 2012. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell University Press, 1981. Harman, Chris. Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx. Haymarket Books, 2010. Harman, Graham. “Everything Is Not Connected.” Bells and Whistles: More Speculative Realism. Zero Books, 2013, pp. 100–127. ———. Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Open Court, 2005. Israel, Jonathan I. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford University Press, 2001.

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Klein, Julie R. “Towards the Future of Spinoza Studies, Journal of Spinoza Studies, Volume 1, Issue 1 (2022), pp. 49–61. https://doi.org/10.21827/ jss.1.1.38828. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Mackay, Robin, ed. Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development. Vol. 3, December 2012, pp. 1–458. Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. 1, translated by Ben Fowkes, Penguin, 1976. ———. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Marx-Engels Collected Works. Vol. 11, Progress Publishers, 1979, pp. 99–197. ———. Introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3. Progress Publishers, 1975, pp. 175–187. ———. Letter to Ruge, September 1843. Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3. Progress Publishers, 1975, pp. 141–145. Marx, Karl, and Fredrick Engels. The German Ideology. Marx-Engels Collected Works. Vol. 5. International Publishers, 1976, pp. 19–539. Montag, Warren. Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries. Verso, 1999. Morton, Timothy. Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press, 2010. Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics. The Collected Works of Spinoza, edited and translated by Edwin Curley, Princeton University Press, 1985, pp. 408–617. ———. Political Treatise. Collected Works of Spinoza. Vol. II, edited and translated by Edwin Curley, Princeton University Press, 2016, pp. 503–604.

CHAPTER 2

The Orphan of History, the Left Hermeneutic and Self-Relating Substance

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In the contemporary left writings on the social logic, Spinoza is the thinker of a radical new philosophy. According to Althusser, whose later writings announced Spinoza as a revolutionary precursor to Marx and the source of Althusser’s own theory of ideology, Spinoza is “an incomparable liberator of the mind” (“The Only Materialist Tradition, Part I: Spinoza” 4), and he goes so far as to say that “Spinoza’s philosophy introduced an unprecedented theoretical revolution in philosophy, probably the greatest philosophical revolution of all time” (Reading Capital: The Complete Edition 250). Antonio Negri, in the same vein, suggests that Spinoza is not just “anomalous” (the basic claim of Negri’s highly influential Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics ), but the excessiveness of Spinoza’s anomalous later writings break with history itself: “In effect, this definition of his thought that we are proposing comes close to denying that he belongs to history” (20). A similar tone is echoed in such titles as Dan Levin’s Spinoza: The Young Thinker Who Destroyed the Past. It is the history-rupturing nature of Spinoza’s writings that, Negri claims, makes him “savage”—that is, a radical singularity and the “destruction of every transcendental” and the “power of ontological inversion” (Savage Anomaly 42; 84)—and that explains not only his excommunication in seventeenth-century Holland but his significance in the contemporary moment. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature America, Inc. 2025 K. DeFazio, Spinoza, New Materialism and the Contemporary, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50232-2_2

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The mainstream left narrative of Spinoza, in other words, is one in which an exile emerges out of the margins of history to become a voice of history and its future. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost put it in discussing new materialism’s indebtedness to “alternative ontologies” like his, Spinoza enjoyed “a far more subterranean or subjugated existence” than his contemporaries like Descartes (Introduction, New Materialisms 8). There is, Deleuze insists, “no living corpse who raises the lid of his coffin so powerfully, crying so loudly ‘I am not one of yours’” (Dialogues 15) to those who might locate Spinoza in a wider historical context of the early modern era. He could not be “heard” in his day, according to familiar narratives, because his thought, championing a new metaphysics and politics for a burgeoning era of democracy, was so entirely out of joint with his own present. Only in the democracy-to-come could the real significance of his writings be recognized. Spinoza, in the new theoretical annotations of his writings, is our contemporary. He was not of his time but our own. Some critics, like Michael Hardt, who sees in Spinoza the basis of “communist” ontology, insist that he exceeds our time as well: Spinoza describes “our own future” (Hardt, Preface to Savage Anomaly xvi). This of course is an iteration of the views of Alexandre Matheron, for whom “Spinoza went as far as one could possibly go on every issue while still being a thinker of the bourgeoisie; and then eventually I realised that he had gone so far that he was no longer implicated in any relation with the bourgeoisie at all. At the start, then, I began studying Spinoza because I saw in him somebody who had the great merit, beyond the limits imposed on him by his class position” (Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza 363). The notion that Spinoza is an orphan of history, that he was not of his time (or class), however, is a left invention which inverts his real significance. Spinoza, for whom all being is an immanent (not transcendent) manifestation of a single substance (God or Nature—his univocality that is the basis of Deleuze’s meditation on difference) in fact articulates one of the most advanced metaphysics of spiritual capitalism, which is to say, liberal capitalism: one that, in a highly abstract and geometrically precise language, affirms ontological equality (what has come to be called today a “flat” ontology) within profoundly unequal economic relations. This made Spinoza a philosophical and political radical in own era and an ongoing source of theoretical and political normalization of (post)neoliberalism in its various reiterations. It is not, in other words, what Warren Montag, echoing another Left Spinozist, Pierre Macherey,

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calls the radical “openness” and “inexhaustible productivity” of Spinoza’s work that make it “immanently” able “to renew itself incessantly in irreducibly dispersed and diverse forms” (The New Spinoza x–xi), a characterization that comes close to parodying the bourgeois tall tale of capital as endlessly self-generating. Univocity—in which “Being is the same for all these modalities, but these modalities are not the same. It is ‘equal’ for all, but they themselves are not equal” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 36)—is a philosophical translation of economic inequality in the ethical language of being. The theoretical strategies by which Spinoza is made a holy Saint of history and cut off from his own time—in the same way that Saint Francis of Assisi is isolated from his own class and the material relations of his own time by Negri and Hardt (Empire 411 ff.)—are significant. Abandoning class struggles, the left has resorted to homilies and tropic thoughts of mystics, priests and philosophers as a guide to the future. These strategies are, however, related philosophically to the materialism of substance that Spinoza himself develops—a metaphysical materialism of things and their networks of affects, in which historical relations disappear into a univocal substance and its expression in an infinity of concrete things and objects, the concreteness of which are the effects of their being violently separated from the abstract relations that form them. Spinoza is championed for championing a world in which god is immanent in all things, against a world created by a transcendent god, since in this immanent world all things are part of one substance and act in accordance with natural laws and physical causes, thus affecting each other without any (external) divine intervention. This is a matter-ism, however, and it is a response to the scientific progress of the time enabled by the rising surplus labor extracted from labor. (The surplus provided for the free time of scientific experiments.) These scientific ideas not only made possible the new technologies that increased the rate of relative surplus, but also allowed capitalism to free itself from some of the ideas that had become fetters in its own advancement. God, for example, was no longer necessary as the cause of all causes but was still needed to organize the world by some laws that normalized the rising capitalism and its regime of labor. Thus the rise of deism— a guardian of capitalism without interfering in its violent exploitation of labor and always ordering the universe according to capital’s needs. Deleuze, Negri and other interpreters read Spinoza to update this form

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of god-liness without god (for the spiritualism that was the 1968 “revolution”: a reaffirmation of capital from the left) by reviving the medieval univocality (e.g., Duns Scotus). Spinoza’s radical challenge to the Judeo-Christian religious tradition and the feudal state that religious doctrine naturalized is thus in certain ways a theological and philosophical advance in the early modern period. It is an advance in thinking, as Mustafa Akyol argues, that was inspired by the twelfth-century Arabic writer Ibn Tufayl who established the complementary of religion and reason (“The Muslims Who Inspired Spinoza, Locke and Defoe”). But it is an advance primarily in the service of economic relations, and in the interests of an emerging class. The role of Spinozian metaphysics therefore becomes more and more spiritualizing as an explanatory system of thought and his politics more and more conservative, the more the bourgeois relations of capital become hegemonic, structuring social life across the globe and making a radical transformation of property relations—the end of class relations, not of a particular class—possible. In contemporary thought, Spinoza is used to advance a new compassionate materialism—what Jane Bennett calls a “vital materialism” heavily indebted to Spinoza and Bergson—that is ultimately a “communism of capital” (Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude 110–111). This new materialism, as it will become clearer throughout this book, is a response in philosophy to the cultural needs of capitalism that for contemporary legitimation needs to be seen as ethical. It is a “new materialism” for a “new capitalism” that in other words has to ethically reformulate itself while increasing the rate of profit. Which is another way of saying it is a materialism for a politics of redistribution. As such, it leaves revolution (far) behind. “Vital materialism,” as Bennett makes clear, will not address “exploitation” or “oppression” but it would set up a kind of safety net for those humans who are now in a world where Kantian morality is the standard, routinely made to suffer because they do not conform to a particular (Euro-American, bourgeois, theocentric, or other) model of personhood. (Bennett 13)

Despite Bennett’s suggestion, people are denied “personhood” not because of dualistic thinking, rigid moral standards or the state, as the Left Spinozists claim. The exclusion of subjectivities that are not in line

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with the norms of North Atlantic social codes are effects of exchange relations—the “thing-ification” logic of economic exploitation that structures all of social life. If what Bennett calls the “standard” of morality is changing, to be clearer, it is not because of objects’ newfound agency but the economic relations which under cognitive capitalism have increased the intensity of labor to bring up the rate of surplus labor (Chris Harmon, Zombie Capitalism). The changes in the way surplus labor is exploited have been normalized since the 1960s through the policies of neoliberalism, the discourse of which Pierre Bourdieu refers to as the “utopia of a pure and perfect market.” At its core, “This project aims to create the conditions under which the ‘theory’ [of neoliberalism] can be realised and can function: a programme of the methodical destruction of collectives” (“The Essence of Neoliberalism”). Neoliberalism’s “politics of financial deregulation” that are usually the focus of critical attention— cuts in social programs and taxes, trade agreements that prevent nations from imposing taxes on foreign companies or implementing laws for safe working conditions, the IMF and the World Trade Organization that enforce such measures globally, etc.—are mediations of an economic demand. The social consequences of this demand have been catastrophic. And following the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and subsequently the COVID-19 pandemic, they have had to be contained in new ways. Ones that allow the increase in the rate of profit with a more feeling façade—a redistribution of some of the accumulated wealth, and cultural narratives through which the updating of neoliberalism after its crisis is represented as deriving not from relations of exploitation but from a higher, more “ecological” consciousness in which all “things” (are) matter. The elevation of things to the status of people while the vast majority of the world is “denied personhood” (Bennett) is an extension in theory of neoliberalism’s destruction of the “collectivity” (Bourdieu) to expand accumulation, which is now normalized through the new discourse of (non)human assemblages (e.g. Cudworth and Hobden’s Posthuman International Relations: Complexity, Ecologism and Global Politics ). In these discourses, which are relays of commodity relations, the relations between people are translated into the relations between things (Marx, Capital I 125–177). New materialists are of course deeply concerned with the deepening divisions of social life and alarmed by the separation of people from each other and from the “material world” in which they are “embedded”

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(Coole and Frost 34). In Philosophy After Nature, Rosi Braidotti and Rick Dolphijin speak directly to permeating social conflicts and the dire threat posed to humans and the natural world by capital’s “never-ending search for ever-growing profit” (2). But, drawing from Spinoza, they interpret material relations of capital and its effects through the lens of metaphysics (idealism). Capital’s ontology—its historical essence in exploiting labor—is interpreted as an effect of a binary mode of thought that in turn produces a vast range of other binary forms of thought and practice (such as “Darwinism” and “individualism”). On the terms of a “critical Spinozism of Deleuze and Guattari,” they call instead for “a monistic ontology that supports a cooperative vision of human relationality and its evolutionary capacity” (2). The separation and lack of “cooperation” in social life, like individualism, however, is an effect, not a cause. The new Spinozians displace cause by its effect—a tendency that after Foucault has become a rule in the left social theory in general.1 New materialism addresses the deepening divisions of social life by advancing a new discourse of distribution, a version of what Bennett calls the “safety net for those” who have been made to “suffer,” as I mentioned above. In contrast to earlier forms of materialism, like cultural materialism and textual materialism and especially deconstruction tendencies—which, as Dianna Coole and Samantha Frost write in their introduction to one of the tutor texts of new materialism, are “now more or less exhausted” (Introduction, New Materialisms 3)—new materialists insist on a more encompassing ontology. Declaring that it is no longer possible to ignore the way in which “As human beings we inhabit an ineluctably material world” (Coole and Frost 34), proponents claim materialism must go beyond human culture and language to include nature, objects, matter and (non)human life into its analysis of “exclusion.” The abstractness

1 It is worth noting here that in the analysis of the hybrid concept of Spinozian “affect” as what Deleuze calls “feeling thought,” Julian Manley argues that it is related to the Foucauldian notion of “effectual causes” (“From Cause and Effect to Effectual Causes” 70)—a concept in which cause and effect are collapsed and made mutually co-determining, which, instead of offering a more “complex” approach, in fact paves the way in theory for the mystification of root causes. Even Spinoza, however, critiqued the mistaking of effects for causes—“this doctrine concerning [final causes] turns nature completely upside down. For what is really a cause, it considers as an effect, and conversely” (EI Appendix, 442)—and was at times able to see in this a material relation, even if he didn’t pursue it to its historical materialist conclusions owing to the limits of his time and his own class position.

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of the concept “exclusion,” it is important to note, is attractive in part because of its wide (and often universalizing) applicability; anyone and anything can be said to be excluded from something, the effect of which is to actually collapse the relations and structures of power new materialism is concerned to address. Like the new materialism of matter and objects, it is what Graham Harman uncritically calls a “theory of everything” (Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything ). The inclusiveness of new materialism is an inversion of the relations it philosophically translates. To make one of the arguments that informs Spinoza, New Materialism and the Contemporary more explicit, I argue that the economic logic structuring social life in Spinoza’s era is the same logic that shapes contemporary social life. Capital in its structuring logic is an economic regime in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. (Marx, Capital III 777–778)

The forms under which the exploitation of surplus labor takes place have changed, of course—e.g., from industrial to postindustrial capital, and the replacement of assembly-line production to Toyotaism (the policies of which are manifest in neoliberalism)—but not its structuring relations of exploitation at the point of production. Spinoza’s metaphysics (like Left Spinozism) is a mediation of this social logic. Spinoza lived in the most advanced center of capitalist relations in the seventeenth century in Holland, the fortunes and relative freedom of science and intellectual exchange of which were thoroughly dependent on the advance of productive forces made possible by the increasing rate of relative surplus value enabled by new technologies and the labor power of free labor and especially enslaved labor, of the colonial other through colonial trade. Capital accumulation, to be clear, is not a matter of “repossession”; its basis, to say it again, is in the labor power of the other: colonialism is an exploitation not a theft (in its general sense). This accumulation of surplus value in the hands of manufacturers and merchants, and the global development of market relations, led to the

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(one-sided) flourishing of cultural, political and intellectual life for those who benefited from this “Dutch Miracle” (K. W. Swart). This included of course the more privileged members of society—merchants, aristocrats, intellectuals—but workers also benefited from it too. This is the root of patriotism, which is a nationalist urge to surplus labor of the other, though it is obviously not as much for the worker as for capital. With tellingly few exceptions even among Marxian thinkers, however, class relations, and Spinoza’s position in them, are almost entirely suppressed in dominant interpretations of Spinoza. If they are addressed at all, it is often in view of either establishing Spinoza as more or less fundamentally distinct from other forerunners of bourgeois philosophy and politics, like Descartes, Hobbes and Hume (an argument developed by Negri in all his writings on Spinoza), or as radically disillusioned with the world of material goods and exchange, his metaphysics thus being read as the outcome primarily of turning away from this world and instead leading a virtuous life (the latter being also the basis of the now discredited claims that he was a “recluse”). Even when the Spinozist left does specifically address his class position, the exploitative nature of class is often quietly ignored in order to emphasize the progressive bourgeois relation to the state. Montag, for instance, refers to Spinoza’s affiliates and allies as “representatives of the urban and maritime bourgeois class who stood for religious and intellectual tolerance and the predominance of state over church” (xii). One of the marks of the left interpretations of Spinoza is its substitution of “power” for “economic” relations. Power itself is said to be material. Power however is not an autonomous social relation. It is a derivative of ownership of the means of production of wealth not in itself—there is no power in itself. A consequence of Montag’s concern with power is that he glosses over the fact that those who defended tolerance and freedom, exploited and enslaved others through the colonial (“maritime”) relations on which the advance of the market and the bourgeois class interests depended. In his critical reading of Negri’s trope of “savage” in Savage Anomaly, George Caffentzis re-situates Spinoza’s writing along with other radical bourgeois thinkers of his time, like Hobbes and Descartes (whom Negri argues are fundamentally different from Spinoza). Most significantly, and as I will discuss at further length below, Caffentzis argues that what has led to the dominant interpretations of Spinoza as anomalous is that, for the most part, scholars have erased his material conditions: that is to say, how he “endeavored to survive among the ‘necessary’ facts of

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life” (“How Savage was Spinoza?” 195). Much effort has been made to place Spinoza and his metaphysical substance outside of history, but Spinoza, Caffentzis emphasizes, was, like many others in his wide social circles, a merchant, and later on became a petty-bourgeois artisan—a lens grinder—at the cutting edge of technology whose own conditions of possibility were thoroughly implicated in the world market and colonialism and who maintained connections with highly influential political leaders and businessmen as well as scientists and other radical bourgeois thinkers. In particular, Caffentzis demonstrates the manner in which “God” (or substance) in Spinoza, is integrally connected to a democratic theory of the state and civil society without which the advance of bourgeois relations would be impossible. Spinoza’s philosophy, Caffentzis shows, is not a departure from his material conditions but an extension of them. Precisely because the concept of (Spinozian) substance is the ground of some of the most influential refashionings of materialism in the (post)humanities and significantly informs left politics today, it is necessary to revisit Spinoza’s metaphysics in light of these critical issues and their wider historical implications for left thought and the movements for social transformation. Before doing so, it may be useful here to further clarify what I mean by “left” since it is important to my argument. By the left (left discourses) I mean intellectual and activist discourses that present themselves as more or less formally opposed to capitalism but that normalize its root relations. Despite the many idioms of left discourse, therefore, they are all marked by a doubleness. The doubleness of left discourses is different from the more outright and vulgar defenses and contradictions of the right, which supports capitalism in its most essential relations (class rule, support of free market while opposing immigration, etc.). The left’s is the doubleness of a more subtle support of capitalism. Left writers like Derrida, for instance, challenge the fixing of identity by power and appeal to materiality while making both spectral, by textually undoing the ground on which the class relations of labor and capital can be understood. Or, in the case of Negri, a more political concern with class and the power of the working class is advanced through the dismantling of the analysis of the labor theory of value which determines and regulates capitalism. I say the left “formally opposes” capitalism, in other words, because it primarily opposes (some of) the effects of capitalism, not its roots in the

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economic relations of exploitation. It criticizes restrictive and destructive outcomes of these relations—its instrumentalism, its deployment of gender, race……, its destruction of the environment and so on—not the material relations that produce these effects. It champions resistance to capitalism but dismisses revolution (as outdated, totalitarian, impossible). Or, like Hardt and Negri, it denies any “conflict between reform and revolution” (Multitude 289). The left occupies such an important position in the elite (especially academic) institutions of capitalism precisely because its criticisms of capitalism never address the root relations of capitalism, and so it actually facilitates the discarding of old ideas and practices that have become outdated and a drain on profit. The left itself has therefore become instrumental: in the postwar period of capitalism, it has become an instrument of suppressing class consciousness. Undoing on populist epistemological and political grounds the concept of the vanguard, it has played a critical role in preventing the development of a strong (class conscious) labor movement in the capitalist centers of the world, one of the major consequences of which is the cultivation of a (bourgeois) consciousness in the global north that severs the conditions of the working class in the global north from those in the global south, where most of the products on which workers in rich nations depend are produced. This left global imaginary without an international working class, this consciousness mediated by the inverting relations of exchange, finds in Spinoza a wellspring of doubling strategies.

2.2

Two

The concept of substance is of course at the core of Spinozian metaphysics, rigorously elaborated in the Ethics , first published immediately after Spinoza’s death in 1677. One of its main achievements is widely regarded as the manner in which he establishes with geometrical precision the basis of all reality in one substance that is not determined externally by God; instead, substance is God and substance is one, with infinite attributes constituting the diversity of all reality. Traditional philosophical annotations and analyses of Spinoza’s metaphysics have tended to focus on the innovative logical proofs by which Spinoza concludes that God is an infinite, eternal and indivisible substance, that God exists with the same causeless necessity as nature. Proceeding through definitions, axioms, propositions and their further

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corollaries and scholia to establish this “God or substance” as self-causing and as all that exists, Spinoza is recognized for the brilliant manner in which he makes the world the effect, not of an anthropomorphized God, who wills actions on earth and who commands belief and condemns disbelievers. God—or nature—is another name for the infinity of the existing universe, without beginning or end. Left Spinozists have tended either to treat the geometric method as secondary to the main achievement of Spinoza’s monism, or, as in the case of Deleuze and Althusser, they read the metaphysical argument as a kind of subversion of the geometric. Or, like Elizabeth Grosz, from a somewhat different position, they make the “metaphysics” of Spinoza secondary to his “ontology.” Spinoza’s thought, she writes, is “the most thorough and abstract analysis of the functioning of the concept of ‘something being in something,’ perhaps interested less in thinking the operations of substance than the concept of ‘in’” (Incorporeal 54–55)—a path laid out by the earlier Left Spinozists by re-interpreting (flattening) many aspects of the Ethics ’ metaphysical arguments, or what Grosz calls “operations,” through the analytics of “expression,” by which Spinozian being is made the ground of difference, singularity and affective intensity. As I will discuss in more detail below, this is in part because for the left, what makes Spinoza significant is not his contribution to rationalism or his defense of Reason—which in fact leads Spinoza to insist “It is of the nature of Reason to regard things as necessary and not as contingent” (EIIP44C2D, 481). It is instead for left writers Spinoza’s challenge to dualistic, mechanical and teleological thought and the way this leads him to critique discourses of power and to bring new attention to the body and its affects. Reason and Necessity (unlike Substance) have, of course, come to be viewed by the left as legacies of rigid, binary thought systems that violently suppress difference and contingency, which in contemporary new materialist thought become new founding concepts (e.g., Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition; Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency; etc.). When Spinoza’s appeal to reason is affirmatively addressed in Left Spinozist writing, reason is more a trope for what Deleuze calls “intuitive intellect” (Spinoza 58), not systematic analytical thought. Thus, both traditional and left scholars have emphasized the way Spinoza’s monism, according to which “in Nature there is only one substance, and …it is absolutely infinite” (IP14C1, 420), is a resituating not only of God but of traditional and especially dualistic treatments of

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substance. In contrast to Descartes, for whom mind and body constitute different substances, there is for Spinoza one, unified, indivisible, and infinite substance, which he identifies with “God sive Nature” (“God or Nature”), a consequence of which is that all things, whether in thought or empirical reality (the attributes of thought and extension and their concrete forms or modes), derive from and are substance. Rather than rendering the attributes of thought and extension entirely separate substances that are themselves produced externally by something else (God), as Descartes had proposed, Spinoza overcomes the dualism of Cartesian metaphysics precisely by treating substance as constituting and constitutive of the infinite attributes in which it expresses itself, and making particular, finite things (e.g., specific ideas and concrete matter) “modifications” of one and the same substance. One critical implication of this is that “the Mind and the Body are one and the same thing, which is conceived now under the attribute of Thought, now under the attribute of Extension” (IIIP2S, 494). Substance, in effect, subtends the worlds of thought and matter and serves as a basis of connection between them. Humanity, by implication, is not separate from God, nor however is God understood as “in” humanity. Rather, humanity, like everything else that exists, exists “in God” (“Whatever is, is in God”; IP15, 420). And nothing exists outside of God. It is precisely in this context that Grosz writes that Spinoza’s work “can be described as the most thorough and abstract analysis of …. ‘something being in something’” (Incorporeal 54–55). In the attributes that make up the finite realms of ideas on one hand and physical matter on the other, of mind and body, as Grosz hints, God does not “create” a world separate from God, God exists as the essence of its infinite attributes, in infinite modes. Grosz treats the foregrounding of “in” in Spinoza’s theory of substance as a sign of his “inclusiveness.” Spinoza’s univocality is, in reality, a view that closes off an entity in itself and thus rules out any “outside.” This is a construction of a self-including logic, whose roots are in the expanding market relations. The immanence of substance is a logic that closes off capital in itself. Capital, in other words, is the power that immanently produces itself and is thus free from outside (i.e., labor power) to produce value. But this is a spiritual theory of value. Grosz’s affirmation is an updating of such a theory for cognitive capitalism—the digital as self-begetting. The disappearance of the concept of “outside” in left thought is part of the theoretical rewriting of capitalism

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as an immanent field without contradiction and thus without a basis of transformation, which is to say a capitalism without end. Spinoza, to repeat, constructs a self-including logic. At the same time, in his theorization of the attributes and modes of substance—the “attribute” being the “essence” of substance (ID4, 408) in thought or extension and the “mode” the “affections of a substance” or that which is “in another through which is it is also conceived” (ID5, 409)—he seems to articulate a level of autonomy and difference in the finite world of nature and human life. By distinguishing essence from existence and making the essence of substance its being/existence in contrast to finite beings which come into being and pass away (and thus do not have existence as their essence), Spinoza allows the natural and social world of finite ideas and empirical reality to operate according to physical laws that are both autonomous from yet in the last instance part of substance. Thus he writes, “The being of substance does not pertain to the essence of man, or substance does not constitute the form of man”; rather, “the essence of man is constituted by certain modifications of God’s attributes” (II P10 and C, 454). “That God produces ‘an infinity of things in an infinity of modes,’” as Deleuze puts it in one of his theorizations of Spinozian univocity, “means that effects are indeed things, that is, real beings which have an essence and existence of their own, but do not exist and have no being apart from the attributes in which they are produced. In this way, there is a univocity of Being (attributes), although that which is (of which Being is affirmed) is not at all the same (substance or modes)” (Spinoza 91). This is the sense in which Spinoza’s materialism of things develops an “immanent” theory of causality according to which the world operates on the basis of its own laws not transcendental ones: “God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things” (P18, 428). Substance’s power is within ideas and matter not imposed upon it from the outside—a concept that has become central to left theory and cultural theory in general. “What is involved is no longer the affirmation of a single substance, but rather the laying out of a common plane of immanence on which all bodies, all minds, and all individuals are situated” (Deleuze, Spinoza 122). Even in the non-Spinozian Heidegger in whose writing it is existence not essence that is emphasized, existence is immanent (dasein). Such arguments have led many scholars, like Edwin Curley, to conclude that “Spinoza is best regarded as a kind of materialist” (Behind the Geometrical Method xiv). For Curley Spinoza’s “materialism” consists

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in identifying mind and body as different expressions of the same substance—which is essentially the foundation of the new materialist theory of “materialism” (Coole and Frost, New Materialisms ). Others point to the way Spinoza treats ideas as the idea of a body thus giving ideas a corporeal connection (“the object of our Mind is the existing Body and nothing else” (IIP13D, 457)) and makes both mind and body subject to causal laws, relations of necessity: “the way of understanding the nature of anything, of whatever kind” must be “through the universal laws and rules of nature” (Preface to Part III, 492), which leads Spinoza to argue that “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things” and “vice versa” (VPID, 597), a statement articulating the “parallel” causal orders of thought and matter that cannot be said to determine each other but are rather caused by the same substance of which they are attributes.2 Nineteenth-century materialists like Feuerbach, for similar reasons, had championed Spinoza as a materialist, arguing that he gave “sound expression, subject to the limitations of his day, of the materialistic conceptions of the modern age” (cited in Akselrod 1). But what is foregrounded here is Spinoza’s treatment of matter and physical laws of interaction of matter (which are both posited as operating outside of historical relations). This concern with matter becomes increasingly clear with Left Spinozists like Deleuze, for whom Spinoza is a “materialist” because he “de-values” consciousness relative to body and matter, and makes all exist on an immanent plane of being (Spinoza: Practical Philosophy 17–22). It is telling that in Deleuze’s Spinozian theory of materialism, matter is a liquidity, namely a “flowing-matter” (Cinema 1, 80). Deleuze, in other words, does away with any friction in matter; matter itself becomes “intensity.” In A Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze and Guattari ask, “is not Spinoza’s Ethics the great book of the BwO” (158)—the “body without organs,” or in other words, the body without

2 This is the basis of Negri and Hardt’s “revolutionary parallelism” in Commonwealth

(325–344). In parallelism, Deleuze finds a means of “assert[ing] an identity of being between objects and ideas” (Expressionism 117) that “excludes” “all efficient or formal (and a fortiori material and final) causality between ideas and things, things and ideas” (116). Parallelism in the Left Spinozists is a means of undoing the causal relations of the material and the immaterial.

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“order,” which is identified with “God” and the “State” (158–159)— Deleuze’s frictionless matter takes the form of “nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity”: “Matter equals energy” (158). Negri, from a similar position, insists that Spinoza entirely does away with all ontological “order” (hierarchy) in being and makes “being” itself “productive.” On these grounds, he writes, “Spinoza founds Modern materialism in its highest from, determining the horizons of both Modern and contemporary philosophical speculation within an immanent and given philosophy of being and an atheism defined as the negation of every presupposed ordering of either the constitution of being or human behavior” (Negri xvii–xviii). This is really a deism not atheism, which is the rejection (negation) of god. What Negri is addressing is a godliness without God—a god that organizes and then leaves the organization to work on its own. Both Deleuze and Negri see in Spinoza the basis of a new materialism that is not historical or dialectical or mechanical (they claim). For Deleuze, Spinoza is the basis of a radical “metaphysical” materialism (Expressionism in Philosophy). According to Negri, he is a “revolutionary material[ist]” and founds a tradition in modernity Negri calls “altermodernity” (Commonwealth 107), a tradition Negri identifies with Spinoza’s development of a “constituent being” according to which “being” is “power” (“potentia”) (Negri, “A Different Power to Act” 135–145). And potentia, as Negri elaborates throughout Savage Anomaly, is always resistant to the Power of capital and its institutions (postestas ). Spinoza is rightly recognized for the systematic nature of his thought by which he unites all that exists; by establishing all that exists as Nature itself, under different attributes and modifications of itself, he excludes any notion of a supernatural deity that wills events, and thereby paves the way for the further advance of scientific study of the empirical world of matter on the one hand and offers a kind of dialectical approach to the world that grasps what appear to be opposed entities as part of a unity that can be known by humans, who are themselves part of that unity. However, this is precisely what makes him a naturalist not a materialist. He is a naturalist, as Don Garrett explains, “in the sense of holding that nothing exists outside of or beyond Nature” (Introduction, Cambridge Companion to Spinoza 9). In other words, “by reconceiving Nature as active and self-causing, and at the same time reconceiving God

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as nonpurposive and extended, he was able to conceive of God as identical with, rather than as the transcendent creator of, Nature” (9). Spinoza turned the mystery of the universe into a sign, not of divine power, but human “ignorance,” much of which can be overcome through the proper use of Reason (for the privileged few who can devote themselves to its study). On the one hand, then, “God sive Nature” makes God nature. Spinoza develops a system at the center of which is the world of nature (and humanity) that creates itself: a post-creation narrative of how nature comes to be. Spinoza’s naturalism secularizes being and endows God with all the properties of nature, and develops pathways for the empirical investigation of nature, bodies and affects. Given the widespread undialectical rejection of Descartes today, it is worthwhile noting in this context that “It was really due to Descartes that all the functions as well of intellectual as of physical life were finally regarded as the products of mechanical changes” (Lange 243). Naturalism, like the Enlightenment more generally, it is important to emphasize here, is a relay of the advance of productive forces of capital in Europe and especially Holland in the seventeenth century. In contrast to the Baroque, occult modes of knowing (to which Negri emphasizes Spinoza offered an alternative) which shrouded nature in occult qualities, Enlightenment thought crystalized “efficient” thought. Thought, that is, prioritizing reason and the centrality of the human over the church for the early modern period of capitalist manufacture. The ultimate goal of machines and Reason are however, not their “instrumentality”—instrumentality is itself an effect of their ability to exploit labor at a higher rate, increasing the rate of surplus value. Medieval thought is inefficient (labor-intensive, relatively wasteful). The new productive forces in turn required changes in social relations that would allow for the increasingly unfettered development of scientific thought, challenging the role of the church, and the expansion of commercial culture. But this attention to nature as matter was still a matterism, for which matter was things and objects operating under strictly physical laws and devoid of dialectical transformation—which is to say, without history and without a social subject or agent; human agency is alienated from matter, and hypostatized as (the nature of) matter. Spinoza, who rejected Descartes’ mechanical materialism, tries to give matter some kind of immanent power of acting that both comes from something else of which matter is a part (substance) and unites

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matter with thought as part of the same—spiritual matterism. “The idea of self-sufficiency of nature governed by objective laws was nonexistent in mediaeval culture; since nature was something created, it was controlled by the Maker’s will. To change this paradigm, important ideological shifts were needed in the entire system of the worldview, which occurred only much later in the wake of Newton’s and Voltaire’s deism and Spinoza’s pantheism” (Kalinkin, The Nature of Science 60). These shifts in worldview were responses to the dominant material relations of emergent capitalism. On the other hand, God sive Nature makes nature God. It endows nature with all the qualities of God, with all the immaterial and ahistorical qualities of (an) infinite and eternal being. The substance that is all there is, and of which everything is either an attribute or a modification, is something inherently “infinite” and “eternal.” It is in the nature of this (divine) substance to exist and to produce effects. For this reason, many readers of Spinoza, especially from the Romantic period on, have embraced what they see as Spinoza’s pantheism, suggesting that Spinoza sees God in everything. From a different (Marxist) tradition, writers like Plekanov, and Akselrod have argued that, while Spinoza was “a deeply convinced atheist,” his metaphysical system “created from an anti-religious beginning an abstract entity, dyed with the hues of religion” (“Spinoza and Materialism” 9–10; emphasis in original). To put this another way, even though he “denounced the anthropomorphic prejudice that is found at the origin of theism,” Spinoza was “far from being an anti-theist tout court ” (Simon Duffy 119). It is, therefore, not a coincidence that Bennett specifically uses the language of “faith” when she acknowledges the way her concept of “thing-power” has been inspired by Spinoza, writing, “I share his faith that everything is made from the same substance” (Vibrant Matter x). Substance is spiritual, in other words, regardless of how much Spinoza opposes an anthropomorphized or transcendental God. Or, more precisely, Spinoza “negates” God by distributing God (everywhere). This is why Deleuze’s liquification of matter is significant—matter is, like spirit, flowing, not static, which points up the contradictory logic of matter as substance. It is celebrated as an embrace of the material world, only by making the material world immaterial. At a philosophical level, substance is the manner in which theological principles are translated into logic where they lose their more overt religious trappings while retaining their

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idealist, speculative and often explicitly spiritualist content; logic in this way is made illogical and philosophers the new priests. To clarify: Spinoza draws on the philosophical tradition that, following Aristotle, made substance an independent principle that is without condition. Spinoza writes, “By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e., that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed” (ID3, 408), establishing, as I have said, that substance is without an outside—a zone that is marginalized by the left. The self-relating cause that is at the core of Spinoza’s philosophy, for instance, authorizes the Left Spinozists to affirm the deeply conservative, theological notion that “Explication is always a self-explication, a development, an unfolding, a dynamism: the thing explains itself ” (Deleuze, Spinoza 68; emphasis in original). Nothing of course explains itself, but appeals to “self-explaining” ideas and realities have always been used to justify unequal social relations, and they are at the core of the right and left populism that declares (self-explaining) “experience” as the basis and measure of knowledge. As Spinoza makes clear in his definition of substance, Spinozian monism is premised on its being independent and self -relating (not requiring the existence of anything else for its own existence or essence nor for its conception), while also being the foundation of everything. Substance, to put this another way, is a groundless ground. Through substance, Spinoza makes an infinite, unchanging, nonhistorical principle the basis of all finite existence, thought and physical reality: an objective idealism. Left Spinozists, in turn, translate this idealism into a radical philosophy of interconnection that dispenses with any analysis of the outside relations that makes such metaphysics necessary. As objective idealism, substance, on which everything in the finite material world depends, does not, then, come into being; it has always existed and will always exist, by the nature of its own essence. “By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing” (ID1, 408). This is the givenness of Spinozian substance. Negri, significantly, celebrates the “givenness” of Spinozian ontology, especially as it relates to the “modes,” writing that Spinoza offers “an immanent and given philosophy of being” that he identifies with “Modern materialism in its highest form” (Savage Anomaly xvii). But this is, as I have said, a deeply conservative remaking of materialism. Givennenss, whether of substance or its modifications, makes the world ahistorical. As Spinoza makes clear, substance is not

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something that is produced by anything outside of itself; it is the producer of its own existence: a self-causing effect. And nor can it be understood in relation to anything else, except as itself. “For by substance” Spinoza “understand[s] what is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e., that the knowledge of which does not require the knowledge of any other thing” (IP8S2, 413). Substance exists by, and can only be understood in terms of, itself; everything else existing in the finite world must be understood in terms of it (as effects of self-causing substance). The fact that Negri makes the modes self-causing, rather than caused by substance (an effect of his reading in Savage Anomaly of the Ethics essentially as a “bildungsroman” in which the modes “grow up” and become substance in their own right) does not make his argument anymore “materialist.” It is, rather, the logic of new materialist “distribution” of Power (potestas of Substance) to power (potenia) of all being (self-agency of “matter”). A materialism, in other words, of exchange. Substance, in Spinoza, is “free” in a radically singular sense, since, “That thing is called free which exists from the necessity of its nature alone, and is determined to act by itself alone. But a thing is called necessary, or rather compelled, which is determined by another to exist and to produce an effect in a certain and determinate manner” (ID7, 409). He will of course go on to emphasize that finite things in nature (thought and matter) operate on the basis of physical (natural) laws and are in that sense determined “externally” in addition to being a modification of the “immanently” caused substance. The difference is between Natura naturans and Nautra naturata: by Natura naturans we must understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, or such attributes of substance as express an eternal and infinite essence, i.e. (by P14C1 and P17c2), God, insofar as he is considered as a free cause. But by Nautra naturata I understand whatever follows from the necessity of God’s nature, or from any of God’s attributes, i.e., all the modes of God’s attributes insofar as they are considered as things which are in God, and can neither be nor be conceived without God. (P29S, 434)

Here, however, I would like to emphasize that the freedom of substance consists in its existence as necessary and necessarily unmediated— somehow both beyond the very laws of the universe by which the finite

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world of nature operates and constitutive of them. It is the exemplary—if not originary—in-itself. It is the ideal and ultimately theological premises of such concepts that are critiqued in historical materialism. Marx and Engels in their critique of the Left Hegelians in The German Ideology, argue that theorists like Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner had critiqued Hegel’s religious conception of spirit as the alienation of human life, but they “never left the realm of philosophy” (28). Thus, “however much each professes to have advanced beyond Hegel” (29) they did not “inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the connection of their criticism to their own material surroundings” (30). Instead of examining the philosophical premises from which Hegel begins—idealist premises which assume that reality is a manifestation of unfolding Spirit— they “took pure, unfalsified Hegelian categories such as ‘substance’ and ‘self-consciousness’” (29) and simply gave them more “secular names,” like “man”, “species” and “the unique” (29). Another way of putting this is that they de-divinized the vocabularies of philosophy, not its content. “The Old Hegelians had understood everything as soon as it was reduced to a Hegelian logical category. The Young Hegelians criticised everything by ascribing religious conceptions to it or by declaring that it is a theological matter” (29–30). Not only did they remain within a religious framework. The underlying assumption of the Young Hegelians is fundamentally idealist: that “conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as the Old Hegelians declare them the true bonds of human society)” (30). On these terms, all that is demanded is “to change consciousness”—“a demand to interpret the existing world in a different way” (30). Marx’s materialism of relations is an explanation of the relation between consciousness and the material conditions of human life, and the conditions under which both develop—not for the sake of contemplation, but in order to collectively bring about a society in which the productive activities of humanity and social wealth can be shared by all. It begins with “real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity” (31). This is the starting point because humans “must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history.’ But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, housing, clothing and various other things” and the “production of the means to satisfy these needs”

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(41–42). Marx and Engels refer to this as “the production of material life itself” (42). In doing so, they advance a dialectical theory of humans and their relation to each other and to nature (what Marx calls in Capital I a “metabolic” relation (283)). Consciousness is an outgrowth of this relation under definite social relations. It is “from the very beginning a social product” (German Ideology 44). Class societies however are social only by dividing producers from owners, which is to say they are “unsocial” societies—societies in which people are alienated from each other and from nature. The division of labor that enables some to devote their lives to the study of ideas, while others are forced to provide the goods and services on which all depend to survive leads to material conditions in which “consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice” (45). Spinoza’s theorization of “substance”—like the concepts of Hegel and the Young Hegelians—are forms of consciousness “to which they attribute an independent existence” (30) and thus abstract from the social relations of production (and thus also from nature). Substance is the unconditioned condition. But nothing is “unconditioned” or without foundation. To say that substance exists without any of the conditions that in the material world make things possible is to both separate substance from those natural, physical things while giving the agency of those things a supernatural force. I would like to make more explicit two consequences of Spinoza’s substance here. First, one of the particularly ideologically useful effects of Spinozian metaphysics for capital is to make the expressions or modifications of substance a middle ground between the otherworldly and the worldly, so that (in his system) the finite world of matter—Nautra naturata— operates as an ethereal hybrid zone of externally determined objects and self-causing agency. There is therefore a duality or aporia at the core of his metaphysics which will come to displace dialectics (and, with it, history) in the later Left Spinozists. Dialectics is the analytics of relations in motion. Spinoza’s duality derives from in-betweenism: things are both unified and different, finite and infinite, natural and supernatural…which is to say that things remain in a kind of immanently vibrating status quo. I read this as a contradiction and explain it as a direct effect of social contradictions: the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production in a mode of production premised on the self-expansion of

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capital. Culture is continually revolutionized, only through the continuation of exploitation of surplus value, without which capital cannot exist. These are contradictions that cannot be resolved and thus are referred to another level of reality (from social to conceptual). “The only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo” (Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus 277). Second, monism is what happens when one suspends relations and displaces dialectics with metaphysics. In monism, there is one infinite substance and its infinite and finite expressions. Even the interactions of bodies in the attribute of extension is conceived in terms of purely physical causal series—a chain of reaction and interaction. The modes, furthermore, are not related to substance, which would imply mediation of something else.3 In the most fundamental sense, they are in substance. “By mode I understand the affections of a substance, or that which is in another through which it is also conceived” (ID5, 409). If there is a relationship here it is qualified in terms of affect (corporeal reaction). Nor can finite modifications be said to be “determined” by substance. “Determination,” according to Spinoza “is negation” (Letter to Jarig Jellis, 1674). While Spinoza’s monism is dominantly read as that which is unifying in his metaphysics since it suggests that everything is connected to everything else, in fact the “substance” of that connection is devoid of historical and material relation, and it is for that reason perhaps best grasped theoretically as what Deleuze calls “expression.” Expression develops out of Deleuze’s analysis of Spinoza’s treatment of such issues as the “attributes” of substance as what “expresses an essence of the Divine substance, i.e., what pertains to substance” (IP19D, 428). Deleuze writes, “What is expressed has no existence outside its expressions; each expression is, as it were, the existence of what is expressed” (42). Deleuze’s analysis of expression is of course part of his larger rejection and dismantling of representation, which he identifies with the “state” (power) and “state theory” that reduces the world to “identity.” “Representation fails to capture the affirmed world of difference” (55). Expression is opposed to the logic of the “sign” or “representation,” according to which one thing 3 Even where the language of “mediation” may be used (as when he writes “Since certain things had to be produced by God immediately…and others….had to be produced by the mediation of these first thing” (IP28S, 432–433), Spinoza does not mean a material relation, but what is more precisely theorized by Deleuze as an “expressive” relation.

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can be said to be a mediation of (or determined by) something else which is prior to it: the sign “always signifies a commandment; and it grounds our obedience” (57). In a telling elaboration of the distinction between expression and the sign, he writes: So that the ‘Word of God’ has two very different senses: an expressive Word, which has no need of words or signs, but only of God’s essence and man’s understanding; and an impressed, imperative Word, operating through sign and commandment. The latter is not expressive, but strikes our imagination and inspires in us the required submission. (57)

In the name of a critique of power, Deleuze advocates a kind of knowing in which one intuitively knows God (as one). This is of course a mode of evangelism—hearing the call of substance. It is itself part of the Reformation logic that did away with the need for priests and middlemen and that empowered the believers to directly hear god without the need for translation or mediation. It is remade in terms of philosophy by what Spinoza’s calls the “third knowledge” involving “intuition,” or the “intellectual Love of God” (612). Deleuze gives evangelism philosophical legitimacy through the concept of expression. It becomes—with the wider poststructuralist rethinking of language and representation, a radical challenge to referential theory, cutting the relation of sign and referent. Monist expression is even the meta-logic of Althusser’s rewriting of materialist dialectical causality in terms of “structural causality” at the center of which is a “determinate absence” (Reading Capital 335; my emphasis). The elements of a totality are not determined “externally” from the outside; instead, “the structure is imminent in its effects, a cause immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term, that the whose existence of the structure consists of its effects” (Reading Capital 532–533). In both Deleuze and Althusser, the social logic is governed by an “absent cause” that is only evident in its effects. The effect of which is to negate or absorb the mediations that relate phenomena to each other and to their material relations in the social totality. Through Spinoza, they advance a hermeneutics of the surface that it is represented, as Deleuze indicates, as a critique of power. In reality it dismantles the ability of people to understand and change the root causes of power. The notion that “equal being is immediately present in everything, without mediation or intermediary, even though things reside unequally in this equal being” (Deleuze 37; my emphasis), normalizes

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ontological “equality” within economic relations of inequality, and renders it unnecessary to investigate the (“ontic”) conditions of inequality. “Common” in fact becomes a substitute for (material) “relations.” Spinoza writes: “Things that have nothing in common with one another also cannot be understood through one another, or the concept of the one does not involve the concept of the other” (IA5, 410). A thing is unified and relates only to things with which it shares a common essence. The assumption of common essence as the foundation of connection is integrally related to the notion that a thing cannot be self-divided, and to Spinoza’s rejection of contradiction, in principle. “Things are of a contrary nature,” he writes, “i.e., cannot be in the same subject, insofar as one can destroy the other” (IIIP5, 498). In contrast to the claims of Deleuze, who sees in Spinoza’s ontology a “univocity” celebrating “difference,” monism therefore actually excludes difference by excluding relations. It presupposes the same, expressed everywhere, differently. Matter, Spinoza writes, “is everywhere the same, […] parts are distinguished in it only in so far as we conceive matter to be affected in different ways, so that its parts are distinguished only modally, but not really” (IP15S5, 424). The same substance can produce substantial differences. But the difference here is formal, modal. Differences are “modifications” of a single substance and can be grasped as such through the intellect by use of reason, since, for Spinoza, it is common opinion (“imagination”), often dominated by religious dogma and political institutions, that treats differences in the world as comprised of different substances, a false assumption that legitimates claims that certain aspects of nature as not “worthy” of God. Monism is based on “modal” difference, not material difference. Difference, as an expression of the same (theological) substance, is an immaterial difference. Modal difference is the difference of form, or formal difference. Material difference, by contrast, is based on social relations and productive practices; material difference emerges out of these. The difference between an owner and a worker, for instance, is a material difference—which is to say, a relation. They are different in lifestyle they are not different in their substance (“biologically”). They are different in terms of their relation to production. By owning the material means of production, one can put others to work and profit off of their labor. The other, not owning means of production, is compelled to work for someone else to survive. The relations of owners and workers explains the contradiction of social production and private appropriation of surplus.

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The cultural and lifestyle differences between them are effects of this material difference, mediations of material relations. Similarly, owning a car and not owning a car are both (material) relations. The absence of a thing therefore is as much a relation as its presence is: presence and absence are determined by a complex and interconnected totality of relations, many of which are not physically or empirically “visible” but require analysis to unearth. For new materialists who draw from Spinoza, it is the matter (car) itself that matters not the relations that make it present or absent. What matters is the “vibrant” self-agency of matter or its “thing-power” (Bennett, Vibrant Matter). If there are relations that car matter enters into these are conceptualized as more or less local “assemblages” that, even as they may extend to those who produce the car, the environmental effects of its emissions, and the process of burning the fossil fuel on which it depends, etc., are not themselves connected to the social totality (relations of a mode of production). This is the basis of Bennett’s treatment of the 2003 North American blackout caused by electrical failure as an “assemblage” of human and nonhuman “actants” (24–28). The actants in her reading involve “coal, sweat, electromagnetic fields, computer programs, electron streams, profit motives, heat, lifestyles, nuclear fuel, plastic, fantasies of mastery, static, legislation, water, economic theory, wire and wood” etc., so that for “the vital materialist, the electrical grid is better understood as a volatile mix” of actants (25). Bennett’s writing is especially significant (which is why I return to it at further length in Chapter Three) because it has significantly influenced the way materialism has been reoriented in the twenty-first century so as to rewrite agency, from “a doer (an agent) behind the deed (the blackout)” to a “doing and an effecting by a human-nonhuman assemblage,” or a “federation of actants” (28)—a formulation that updates the logic of expression in Deleuze and Althusser, whereby the cause is made immanent in its effects. Agency (power) is distributed, in Bennett, in a posthuman orientation to nonhuman matter. Confederated agency in effect is the displacement of the human agent, by which the subject of labor is disappeared. The displacement is framed as addressing the fuller “complexity” of phenomena that are increasingly global and thoroughly implicated in nature and the material environment (the “federation of actants is a creature that the concept of moral responsibility fits only loosely and to which the charge of blame will not quite stick” (28)). But this notion of agency submerges the causal relations in a post-anthropological “thick description” of human and nonhuman

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interactions and unpredictabilities. The action of actants, Bennett argues, operates more like what Latour calls “events” that take one by surprise (28). The (event-al) logic of substance, by which the finite world of ideas and bodies is endowed with immanent (not “transcendental”) agency, of course, is not confined to the concept of substance. It in fact extends through the Spinozian system, and is, for instance, at the core of the theory of conatus , which refers to the way all things persevere in their own being. “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being” (EIIIP6, 498). Spinoza, like other bourgeois thinkers in his era, makes the bourgeois right to (preservation of) private property an ontological condition of being itself. For Spinoza this is of course made sense of philosophically, when he writes, “For singular things are modes by which God’s attributes are expressed in a certain and determinate way”; that is, they are “things that express, in a certain and determinate way, God’s power, by which God is and acts” (IIIP6D, 499). I discuss the way in which conatus is developed by Latour in Chapter Three. Here, I will point out that, conatus in Spinoza’s writing (which is informed by other seventeenth-century philosopher’s treatment of the concept) is the projection of the immanent (self-causing) agency of substance onto finite matter. Or, in other words, it is the distribution of agency. New materialists tend to focus on the relations that conative bodies are involved in, in effect rewriting the individual subject in Spinoza as a “transindividual” that challenges dominant bourgeois notions of the individual (Hasana Sharp, “The Force of Ideas in Spinoza”; Jason Read, The Politics of Transindividuality; Yves Citton, Mythocratie; Brian Massumi, Power at the End of the Economy…). But Spinoza is actually specific about the centrality of seeking one’s “self” “advantage” (regardless of his affirmation of the importance of community and helping others seek their own advantage): Since reason demands nothing contrary to nature, it demands that everyone live himself, seek his own advantage, what is really useful to him, want what will really lead man to a greater perfection, and absolutely, that everyone should strive to preserve his own being as far as he can. (EIVP18S, 555)

This is an inherent striving (an “appetite”) in all entities (their “essence”), the consciousness of which Spinoza calls “Desire,” which Spinoza also

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refers to as “the very essence of man” (IVP18D, 555). To desire something, for Spinoza, is to be conscious of one’s bodily appetite to strive for those things that preserve one’s being: “Between appetite and desire there is no difference, except that desire is generally related to men insofar as they are conscious of their appetites” (IIIP9S, 500). “This Appetite, therefore, is nothing but the very essence of man, from whose nature there necessarily follow those things that promote his preservation. And so man is determined to do those things” (IIIP9S, 500). Such arguments make (individual) “desire” the essence of humanity and erase its material and historical conditions. In fact: “if some virtue could be conceived prior to this [virtue], viz. to this striving, the very essence of the thing would be conceived prior to itself,” he writes, “which is absurd” (IVP22D, 558). This makes desire nonsocial, natural—the striving that is prior to all else and that exists in all things and its identical with their power to act. Spinoza absorbs into ontology the social and historical conditions both of “desire” and of “seeking one’s own advantage” and therefore the relations of those who are excluded by normative regimes. Left Spinozists’ focus on the corporeal and community aspects of conatus does not break with the logic of the individual but updates it for the new materialist metaphysics of (neoliberal) capitalism.

2.3

Three

In his layered analysis of Spinoza’s use (in a famous letter) of the metaphor of a worm in the blood to explain the individual’s (unknowing) interconnectedness with the world around it (united by substance), Caffentzis writes that Spinoza’s “personal experience in the world market would be central to his understanding of God sive Nature” (“How Savage Was Spinoza?” 200). Not only was Spinoza’s life “quite similar to most of the major intellectuals of the seventeenth century (part business man, part industrial spy, and mostly political agent of one or another element of the ruling class of Europe”) (195). More importantly, Caffentzis argues, the ways in which he “actually received the money necessary to live in the extremely monetarized Dutch economy of his day” (199) reflect the class relations of Holland and his position in them and help to explain the historical logic of his metaphysics. From an early age, Spinoza was an apprentice to his father, who was, as is well known, a fairly successful merchant in a business “importing

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raisins from Malaga in Spain and sugar from Brazil” (199). Trade between these regions, of course, was ultimately dependent on the colonial relations and the labor of the enslaved people who worked on plantations in Brazil. After his father died in 1654, Spinoza took over this business with his brother and became “a full-fledged merchant and middleman in the importing trade and money market in Amsterdam” (199), while also “taking over ‘wisselbriefs,’ in effect being collection agents in the frequently forfeiting world of international exchange” (199). Caffentizis notes, therefore, that “One important consequence of Spinoza’s herem in 1656 was the loss of his complex networks of economic relations between Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, the Caribbean and South America afforded him by being a member of the Jewish community of Amsterdam. This loss meant the end of his part in the mercantile world” (199). After leaving the business of trade, Spinoza went on to work as an artisan in one of the most high-tech industries of his day—lens grinding and polishing, which, significantly, would give him “insight into a microworld of ‘minute bodies’” (200). He was in this regard what Deleuze calls “practical philosoph[er].” This work has become of interest to writers to contemporary new materialists, who are interested in the close relation of his scientific practices and his scientific theory. As a third source of income, Spinoza’s supporters and affiliates enabled him to live on what is more or less a pension. A disciple and merchant in Amsterdam, Caffentzis notes, “arranged for an annuity of five hundred florins (which Spinoza voluntarily decreased to three hundred)” and there is speculation that he received resources from the Grand Pensionary of Holland, Jan de Witt (200). But whether true or not, Caffentzis writes, “there is no doubt that Spinoza was supported financially by many influential figures in the ruling circle around de Witt like Hudde (the mayor of Leiden), Burgh (the Treasure General of the United Netherlands) [and] Beuningen (the mayor of Amsterdam)” (200). Spinoza’s political and economic affiliates demonstrates the degree to which Spinoza enjoyed intellectual and material support from powerful business figures and political leaders in the emerging bourgeois conditions of Holland, notwithstanding the threat he (and others like de Witt—whose brutal killing led Spinoza to theorize the “multitude” and how to enlighten its members) faced from defenders of absolutist monarchy and religious orthodoxy as a supporter of democracy and the free exchange of ideas.

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The material details Caffentzis discusses are not often addressed in Left Spinozist scholarship and it is therefore worthwhile elaborating a bit further on the issues Caffentzis raises. Referring to Spinoza’s use of the metaphor of the worm in the blood (the circulatory system being in his era a common metaphor for the market, and used also by Hobbes), Caffentzis suggests that its modification by Spinoza is significant in distinguishing Spinoza’s similarity and difference with other bourgeois thinkers. It “reflects the economic dimension of acting in such a market as it intersects with the physiological and micrographical thought of the seventeenth century. For Spinoza presents an image of perpetual exchange and activity ‘colliding’—‘rebounding’— ‘communicating,’ but the power and discipline operating in a world market force the agent to take a very mediated relation to experience” (204). This leads Caffentzis to argue that Spinoza is developing a new theory of the State—one which opposes the brute force of Hobbes’ Leviathan for a more immanent one—a republic. Caffenstizs argues in an important footnote that “Spinoza did not ironically develop this mediational relation to all things, including the self. The whole Dutch ‘miracle’ was written in the famous letters of original accumulation’s ‘fire and blood.’ And this blood was not only that of Africans and Native Americans, as Marx pointed out” (footnote 10; 204). Caffentzis proceeds to cite a passage in Marx’s Capital, which I quote at length: The colonial system ripened, like a hot-house, trade and navigation. The ‘societies Monopolia’ of Luther were power levers for concentration of capital. The colonies secured a market for the budding manufactures, and, through the monopoly of the market, an increasing accumulation. The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into capital. Holland, which first fully developed the colonial system, in 1648, stood already in the acme of its commercial greatness. It was ‘in almost exclusive possession of the East Indian trade and the commerce between the southeast and northwest of Europe. Its fisheries, marine, manufactures, surpassed those of any other country. The total capital of the Republic was probably more important than that of all the rest of Europe put together.’ Gulich forgets to add that by 1648, the people of Holland were more over worked, poorer and more brutally oppressed than those of all the rest of Europe put together. (cited in footnote 10, 204, from Capital I 705–706 (Progress Publishers))

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Spinoza’s metaphysics cannot but be influenced by these profound contradictions. The metaphysics of singular substance and its attributes and modifications reflects a highly sophisticated mediation of these contradictions in which they are absorbed into the dynamics of unified Being. Its unification of reality is a mediation of exchange and its immanent relations that require a liberal, democratic state (not a despotism, nor, later, any heavy-handed forms of regulation). What Étienne Balibar calls the “aporia” of Spinoza’s notion of democratic community (Spinoza and Politics 113–124), it should be noted in this context, is really a (still higher) mediation of the class contradictions inscribed in Spinoza’s metaphysics, “aporia” being one of the left’s favored concepts within which to absorb class contradictions in the philosophical language of “unresolvable” opposition. Spinoza makes an effort to connect all things and to unify the world. But the finite things that exist are “independent” in a double sense; they are driven by a self-preserving agency and they are endowed with this agency by a substance that is self-causing. Even substance is referred to as a “thing.” Steven Nadler makes this explicit when he writes, “When Spinoza defines a substance as that which is ‘in itself,’ he is clearly employing the self-subsistence criterion of substance. A substance is that which is truly ontologically independent, and that is not in or dependent upon something else for its being. It is, in a word, an individual thing in the truest sense” (Spinoza’s Ethics 55). This is the logic of the commodity, which, as Marx writes, seems to have an independent existence, especially independent of the labor that produces it (Capital I 163–177). In reality, the commodity is the outcome of labor under specific productive conditions and relations; in appearance, it exists and operates independently of both, and even more specifically, by itself. Its value comes from (it is assumed) its own worth; it is self-generating, and inherently valuable. Such a self-causing myth is the founding ideological myth of capital, which systematically represents “value” as produced by capital itself— money creates money. The root of money and value, however, are in (surplus) labor. Spinozian substance, to say it again, is the transcription of (abstract) relations of exchange into the more abstract(ed) language of philosophy.

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Four

Left Spinozist thought, since 1968, is perhaps most influentially advanced in the writings of Deleuze, Negri and Althusser. Addressing such figures, works like Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism (1976) and Christopher Norris’s Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory (1991) chart, in different ways, the role of Spinoza in the reformulation of a materialism without determination and a Marxism without socialist politics or communist parties. More recently, Antoine Aubert observes that “first issue of the Cahiers Spinoza, published in 1977 and devoted to the links between Marx and Spinoza” was part of “a more collective phenomena, where, from the 1980s onwards, Spinoza came to Marx as a subversive author” (“Post-’68 Intellectuals and Marx: A Fascination with ‘Farewells’” 257–258). In reality, Spinoza was deployed to de-radicalize Marx. Which is to say that Spinoza is used to reform or displace the projects of socialism and communism, often among writers working within the tradition of Marxism. “No doubt [Spinoza’s] strategy” of undermining theology within the terms of theology, Althusser writes, “comforted me in my personal philosophical and political strategy: to take over the [French Communist] Party from inside its own positions” (The New Spinoza 10). The problem with being an inside critic is that such a reformism takes the system as self-contained and forgets that (as Marx has taught) the selfcontained is an effect of forces outside it. Althusser’s method, which is the broader method of the left in the post-’68 era, is a hermeneutical withdrawal from the social—it is, as his Reading Capital shows, a neoliberal exegesis the purpose of which is to displace class struggle with ideology critique. In his Essays in Self-Criticism he writes, Thus I disregarded the difference between the regions of ideology and the antagonistic class tendencies which run through them, divide them, regroup them and bring them into opposition. The absence of "contradiction" was taking its toll: the question of the class struggle in ideology did not appear. Through the gap created by this “theory” of ideology slipped theoreticism: science. (141; my emphasis)

Althusser, in other words, knows what he is doing and what he has done. The elimination of contradiction in his analysis of capital, like his rendering of the exploitative relations of surplus value an “absent cause,” unmoored his social analytics from the social agency of transformation.

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According to the Left Spinozists, the “crisis” of Marxism made such undertakings necessary. “In the 1960s and 1970s,” Negri writes, “we lived through an epoch of profound crisis of socialist ideology, and of self-critique by Marxist thought,” and he suggests that “today we can rediscover the Spinozan origins of this reflection” (Spinoza for Our Time 20). Marxism, in the familiar left narratives, was too rigid and essentializing, too much concerned with the economic relations of capital, not culture, and, above all, too determining and totalizing. Its historical materialist theory of “dialectics,” it was claimed, violently reduced aspects of culture to mediations of class and, even more violently, made negation and contradiction central to life, opposing the affirmative politics (which, significantly, were emerging in advanced consumer societies). Dialectics, to be clear, is what Alexander Herzen calls the “algebra of revolution” and it is fundamental to the Marxist analysis of history (Rees 50; 55); it explains the ongoing movement of contradictions and, most significantly, shows why the underlying structures of class society can and must be collectively transformed if freedom from necessity— economic freedom, not just political freedom (democracy)—is not to remain the exclusive privilege of a global few. While Engels had famously called Spinoza “the splendid representative of dialectics” (Anti-Duhring ), the Left Spinozists deployed Spinoza as an alternative to it. “Spinozan immanentism,” Negri rejoices, “can finally liberate us from all forms of dialecticism” (Spinoza for Our Time 20). Dialectics, for the Left Spinozists, becomes increasingly associated with a “rigid” approach to change and history. For similar reasons, class becomes displaced with the more amorphous and fluid dynamics of power. “The investigation of the nature of Power has emerged as one of the central projects of contemporary theory, especially among French thinkers” (xi), Hardt writes in his 1991 preface to Negri’s Savage Anomaly (originally published in 1981). Through Spinoza, Negri contributes what Hardt calls a “constructive complement” to this project by introducing the distinction between “Power” (as domination) and “potentia” as “the constitutive force to create society freely” (xii). This distinction, according to Hardt, “greatly enriched” the Marxist framework (xiii) by treating the relation between capital and labor not as “dualistic opposition” but “antagonism,” following “Spinoza’s warning, ‘non opposite sed diversa,’ ‘not opposed but different’” (Hardt xiii). Balibar, as I mentioned above, does away with class contradiction through “aporia.” Deleuze, from a slightly different

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perspective, draws on Spinoza in foregrounding “expression” over dialectics, and difference over identity, rejecting both opposition and identity as concepts he associates with dialectics and its suppression of excess. One of the lessons of the “Left” Spinoza is that, in the anti-dialectic discourse of Hardt that misrepresents dialectics so as to discredit it, “Power and power [potentia] are never related in simple static opposition; rather, the relation between the two concepts moves progressively through several complex transformations toward a deconstruction of the opposition between them” (xiii). Such arguments make “transformation” an immanent, ongoing process without end and consequently without any need for an agent of revolutionary change. In the place of the international working class, what Spinoza calls “the multitude” emerges as a new post-class “collective social subject that is unified inasmuch as it manifests common desires through common social behavior” (xv) and through its “passion and intelligence” the “power” of the multitude “is constantly inventing new social relations” (xv) without transforming the property relations of capitalism. The subject of such interpretations is an affective subject of desire: a subject no longer conceived in terms of their position in the division of labor, but in terms of their constitutive power of being and producing—their potentia—and who always resists the relations of Power (domination). It is a subject more closely articulated with the global market and with the expanding wealth of the global north, the material conditions that become normalized in the writings of the Spinozist Left, in all of its new materialist iterations. This is perhaps therefore the place to insist that, while acknowledging the philosophical and political significance of Spinoza’s writings, Marx and Engels did not do so undialectically. Marx, along with the early theorists of communism and socialism, saw in Spinoza a radical voice of “the modern free-thinkers and materialists,” in the words of Feuerbach (in Principles of the Philosophy of the Future), advocating a philosophy foregrounding human reason, affect and people’s common dependence on each other. But as Marx’s analysis of history and the material relations of capitalism developed through the nineteenth century, moving from his own (what might be called quasi-) “new materialist” writings on Epicurus and other early materialists in his dissertation, to a more advanced and dialectical theorization of the historical relations that mediate the social and humans’ relation to each other and nature, Marx also understood Spinoza as spiritualizing the material world. In their analysis of the history of materialism in Holy Family, Marx and Engels, for instance, argue

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that the role of materialism is to put an end to metaphysics of which Spinoza’s philosophy is an example (Holy Family 125). Marx did not return to Spinoza to theorize material relations, Marx’s historical materialism instead represents a definitive advance beyond the seventeenthand eighteenth-century materialisms of which Spinoza, a progressive early modern bourgeois philosopher, is an extension. When, therefore, writers like Tracie Matysik (who continue the left project “devoted to the links between Marx and Spinoza” (Aubert 257)) argue that Spinoza’s significance for Marx and for us derives from Spinoza’s argument “that people are more joyous and more active—have more power to persevere and to have effects—when they understand themselves as embedded in nature and in webs of social and material relations [….] Activity is a knowing, relational interdependence” (When Marx Met Spinoza: Experiments in Nonhumanist Activity xii), such readings of Marx interpret both Marx and Spinoza from the now hegemonic standpoint of Left Spinozist matterism, and consequently disregard the revolutionary historical materialism of Marx. The Marx, in other words, whose aim was not to affirm the “webs” of “relational interdependence” but “to reveal the economic law of motion of modern society” (Preface, Capital I 92), in order to transform it. If Spinoza’s defense of democracy and free intellectual exchange instead appears radical today, well into the twenty-first century—as the democratic institutions and “welfare states” of the advanced economic centers of capital are in the process of dismantlement owing to the imperatives of accumulation that demand the sacrificing of forms of democracy that had emerged in the post-war era of rising profits in the West and that had appeared to signal “the end of history” (“forever capitalism”) after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and as capitalism (re)turns to authoritarianism and fascism in the global north in response to the falling rate of profit—this is to a significant degree an after-effect of the disastrous consequences of the left’s abandonment of revolutionary theory and practice in the same period, which has helped ensure that, when the crises of capital (re)emerge, there would be no revolutionary theory (itself in the process of dismantlement by the left), and therefore no class-foritself. The class-in-itself, a class without knowledge of its material relations and its historical agency (what Negri in Savage Anomaly celebrates as the supposed “spontaneity” of “subjectivity”), has instead been actively cultivated by the left theorists enchanted with “self-relating” logics and “immanence.”

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References Akselrod (Ortodoks), L. I. “Spinoza and Materialism.” Spinoza in Soviet Philosophy: A Series of Essays, edited by George L. Klein, Humanities Press, 1952. Althusser, Louis. Essays in Self-Criticism. Translated by Grahame Lock, NLB, 1976. ———. “The Only Materialist Tradition, Part I: Spinoza.” The New Spinoza, edited by Warren Montag and Ted Stolze, University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 3–20. Althusser, Louis, et al. Reading Capital: The Complete Edition. Verso, 2016. Anderson, Perry. Considerations on Western Marxism. Verso, 1989. Balibar, Étienne. Spinoza and Politics. Translated by Peter Snowdon, Verso, 1998. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010. Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Essence of Neoliberalism.” Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1998. https://mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bourdieu. Caffentzis, George C. “How Savage Was Spinoza?” Reading Negri: Marxism in the Age of Empire, edited by Pierre Lamarche et al, Open Court, 2011, pp. 193–214. Curley, Edwin. Behind the Geometrical Method. Princeton University Press, 1988. Coole, Diana H., and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press, 2010. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, University of Minnesota Press, 1986. ———. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton, Continuum, 2001. ———. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley, City Lights Books, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Garrett, Don. Introduction. The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, edited by Garrett, Cambridge University Press, 2009. Grosz, Elizabeth A. The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism. Columbia University Press, 2018. Hardt, Michael. Translator’s Foreword: The Anatomy of Power. The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, by Antonio Negri, University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Bellknap Press, 2011. ———. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2001. ———. Multitude. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Harman, Chris. Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx. Haymarket Books, 2010.

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Ilyin, V., and A. Kalinkin. Nature of Science: Epistemological Analysis. AAKAR BOOKS, 2018. Lange, Frederick Albert. The History of Materialism and Criticism of Its Present Importance. Translated by Ernest Chester Thomas. Harcourt, Brace, & Company, 1925. Levin, Dan. Spinoza: The Young Thinker Who Destroyed the Past. Weybright & Talley, 1970. Marx, Karl. Capital, A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. I, translated by Ben Fowkes, Penguin, 1976. ———. Capital. Vol. III. Marx-Engels Collected Works. Vol 37, Progress Publishers, 1983, p. 5-912. Marx, Karl, and Fredrick Engels. The German Ideology. Marx-Engels Collected Works. Vol. 5, International Publishers, 1976, pp. 19–539. Matysik. Tracie. When Marx Met Spinoza: Experiments in Nonhumanist Activity. University of Chicago Press, 2023. Montag, Warren. Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries. Verso, 1999. ———. “Interjecting Empty Spaces: Imagination and Interpretation in Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.” Spinoza Now, edited by Dimitris Vardoulakis, University of Minnesota Press, 2011, pp. 161–178. Montag, Warren, and Ted Stolze, eds. The New Spinoza. University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Nadler, Steven M. Spinoza’s Ethics: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2006. Negri, Antonio. The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. ———. Spinoza for Our Time: Politics and Postmodernity. Translated by William McCuaig, Columbia University Press, 2013. Norris, Christopher. Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory. Blackwell, 1991. Rees, John. The Algebra of Revolution: The Dialectic and the Classical Marxist Tradition. Routledge, 1998. Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics. The Collected Works of Spinoza, edited and translated by Edwin Curley, Princeton University Press, 1985, pp. 408–617. Vardoulakis, Dimitris, ed. Spinoza Now. University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004.

CHAPTER 3

Something Has Happened to Ontology: Contingency, Immanence and Conatus

3.1

One

In his Metaphysics, Aristotle argues that ontology is the “science which investigates being as being” and that the cause of Being is not an “accident” and thus we “must grasp the first causes” (1003a22–1003a31). Aristotelian ontology is, in other words, a foundational ontology, a view that has been held by most Western philosophers until perhaps Heidegger’s Being and Time which is, at least formally, devoted to undoing of the metaphysics of which the foundational ontology is one. Heidegger’s idea of the “destruction” of metaphysics is, of course, in part, the influence of Nietzsche whom he regards to be the “end of Western metaphysics and proceeded to the entirely different question of the truth of Being” (Nietzsche I 10). The contemporary theories of ontology broadly gesture to Heidegger’s Nietzsche and are all ungrounded ontologies. In this chapter I address some of the influential tendencies in contemporary thought for which the task today is to “think being no longer from a unifying ground” (Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Ontology after Ontotheology viii)—a tendency which, like the dominant ontologies before it, are determined by class relations. One of the most significant outcomes of ungrounded ontology is its unmooring of being from the material ground of the social relations of production—the basis of social ontology. In this chapter, I therefore © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature America, Inc. 2025 K. DeFazio, Spinoza, New Materialism and the Contemporary, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50232-2_3

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examine its arguments and assumptions, not merely in themselves but in their relation to the economic contradictions of postwar capitalism. My focus is the remaking of ungrounded ontology in the “ontological turn” of the twenty-first century, for which concerns with “reality” independent of the human mind and entangled “matter” is central, and which is presented by advocates as a necessary move beyond humancentered thinking and being that has dominated Western philosophy. Thus, for many theorists, Spinoza’s univocity and ontological critique of anthropomorphism, to which Nietzsche is indebted, is vital and significantly influenced by the (twentieth century) Left Spinozists. For others, the de-centering takes the form of recognition of reality’s contingent or withdrawing nature. I address examples of these tendencies and their location in the broader posthumanist reorientation of theory since the turn of the twenty-first century, before closely examining the specific ontology of Jane Bennett. In analyzing her theory of materialism, I take as my focus such concepts as immanence, conatus and distributed agency and their elaboration in Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, because these concepts have played an important role in the posthumanities in normalizing the conditions of labor in cognitive capitalism. In contrast to Bennett’s and the Left Spinozist canonic interpretations, conatus (Spinoza’s rendering in the Ethics of “striving” as “persevering in” one’s being) in fact ontologizes the bourgeois desire to seek one’s advantage as an essentially mystical, always already “social” impetus of matter itself, the implications of which become particularly explicit in Bruno Latour’s Spinoza Lectures (What is the Style of Matters of Concern?). The value of such theories is, in other words, ideological: they displace the subjection of the social, and through it the natural, to the self-expansion of capital. Which is to say they dispense with the historical need to confront the fundamental irreconcilability of capitalism and society.

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Two

I argue at the outset that ontology and debates over what constitutes the nature of being (whether Aristotle’s substance, Platonic forms, the atoms of Democritus, Bergson’s élan vital, Derridean textuality, Negri’s potentia, Bennett’s vibrant matter,…) are, like all ideas, outcomes of class struggles. In class societies, ontologies that secure and justify the existing social arrangements are metaphysical. Their main role is to endow what

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is with the appearance of what ought to be, and, in turn, to ideologically suspend the contradiction between existing property relations and the developing productive forces. They do so by inverting the relation of ideas and material reality, positing an ideal ground of existence in transcendental categories, and by translating the dialectical agency of labor into supernatural and speculative agencies. Through these inversions, the class relations of society are, in highly abstract mediations (often, today, in those that deny the very concept of mediation), made transcendental. Metaphysics is, in a broader sense, a cultural substructure of all class societies. Aristotle’s science of being qua being, for instance, called for a rigorous inquiry into first causes through which he helped advance scientific thinking, recognizing the role of labor as an efficient cause in the world while making that itself (and all existence) the agency of a “prime mover” (a divine substance); in doing so he translated the class interests of private property holders and slave owners in the ancient Greek polis into a metaphysically determined universe whose truth it was the task of the science of being to investigate. Spinoza, like Aristotle, assumed that “what being is, is just the question, what is substance” (Aristotle, Metaphysics 1029b4– 1029b5). But Spinoza’s monism is the ontology of an emerging class whose existence depends on ever-increasing surplus value. Spinoza’s is, consequently, a more expansive and immanently dynamic ontology. The differences between such ontologies as Descartes’ and Aristotle’s and Spinoza’s ontology have of course been interpreted, following Deleuze, as a radical difference between “emanation” (according to which “one passes from the superiority of the cause to the superiority of certain forms of being over others” (Expressionism 167)) and “immanence” (which “posits the quality of all forms of being, and the univocity of reality which follows from this equality” (167)). On these terms, Aristotle’s metaphysics vertically orders the world such that all existence is determined transcendentally, while Spinoza’s Substance, God or Nature, makes all existence modifications of one substance, determined immanently not transcendentally. Such differences are used by Deleuze and others to cast Spinoza as a philosopher who subverts class relations. (“I realized that [Spinoza] had gone so far that he was no longer implicated in any relation with the bourgeoisie at all” (Alexandre Matheron, Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza 360)). However, as I have argued in earlier pages, what makes Spinozian metaphysics “perennially” useful in different eras of capital is the abstract manner in which he translates

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the logic of exchange into an inclusive metaphysical logic of existence, which is to say it is a theory of spiritual (liberal) capitalism. The emergence of the Left Spinozists in the era of post-1968 in the global north (e.g., Matheron, Deleuze, Althusser, Warren Montag, Negri…) followed by the growth of Spinoza’s influence in the twenty-first century is a demonstration of its usefulness to capital the postwar reconstruction of (neo)liberal capitalism. Spinoza’s self-causing substance is a metaphysical grounding of being that, in its challenge to religious superstition, commitment to democracy and celebration of the univocity grasped through reason naturalized the emerging class interests of the bourgeoisie in their fight against religious institutions and feudal political interests that sought to limit scientific free inquiry—and which in limiting freedom of thought, limited scientific and technological advances used to extract surplus value both through primitive accumulation and exploitation of labor in production. Through such translations, in different philosophies of being, the exploitation of one class by another is naturalized and placed beyond history. I say “beyond history,” of course, not because Aristotle and Spinoza do not address social, political and historical matters, but because these are ultimately rooted in a (transhistorical) ideal realm or principle. In both, however, being’s groundedness is assumed, and it is by virtue of the grounding of existence that being can be known. There is, in other words, an integral relation between grounded ontologies, reason and truth—between thought and being. Through reason, the causes of what exists and the laws that govern the natural world could be known, and, consequently, so too could the determination of the relation between commonsense and wisdom, between false, limited or partial knowledge and the truth. Descartes, after all, concludes his subjection of all that he thinks and feels to doubt in Meditations with the affirmation that “This consideration is the greatest help to me, not only for noticing all the errors to which my nature is liable, but also for enabling me to correct or avoid them without difficulty” (Meditations VI 61). Spinoza no less than Aristotle (and Descartes) treated the world of substance as governed by laws and necessary relations which reason can discover. This is so much the case with Spinoza’s writings, according to more mainstream philosophical interpretations like Michael Della Rocca’s (unlike the Left Spinozists’), that his philosophy is considered as “perhaps the boldest and most thoroughgoing commitment ever to appear in the history of philosophy to the intelligibility of everything” (Spinoza 1), which Della Rocca attributes to his commitment to the principle of

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sufficient reason, “the principle according to which each fact, each thing that exists, has an explanation” (4). Existence without thought (“explanation”), for Spinoza and Aristotle, is not human existence, which is distinguished from nonhuman life by reason. Consequently, it is important to note here, when contemporary thought ungrounds being, not only is ontology severed from its grounding in causes and laws (part of the justification of which involves rejecting human-centered ontologies), but ontology is separated from truth—and, more generally, from epistemology, so as to displace the question of what is true with the question of what is (there). “I will shift from the language of epistemology to that of ontology,” Bennett writes (Vibrant Matter 3). “I also,” says Manuel DeLanda, “prefer to keep questions of epistemology and ontology separate” (The Rise of Realism 50–51). This separation is established not in order to more comprehensively understand what is; it is not, in other words, the “separation of the real, as a process that exists in itself, from the ways by which it comes to be known” (Lukács, Ontology of Social Being 8). It is instead to suspend inquiry into the material causal grounds of existence. A response to the shift from industrial to postindustrial capitalism which required more flexible modes of extracting surplus value, the route of this separation and displacement was paved in twentieth-century continental philosophy and linguistic and cultural theory by the dismantling of the “correspondence” theory of truth. The correspondence theory of truth—according to which truth is that which accurately reflects the objective world—was displaced by treating truth textually as “a mobile army of metaphors” (Nietzsche, “Truth and Lie” 46), pluralizing the referent (Derrida, Of Grammatology) and, in a more general sense, calling into question the subject/object relation of scientific knowledge as relations of power (Foucault, Power/Knowledge). New forms of ontology in the twenty-first century have extended and updated the displacement of epistemology by treating the (human) subject of truth as a subject of mastery over the nonhuman world, which (it is claimed by contemporary theorists of ontology) is an unethical centering of knowledge and its human subjects. Ontology, on these terms, has been for too long “submitted to the domination of epistemology,” according to Elizabeth Grosz (Incorporeal 3), and must be freed from it, so that being can be encountered without the imposition of reason or the search for truth, both of which are today regarded as universalizing and thus restrictive of the contingencies of existence. Ontology, consequently, has become less

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and less concerned with explanation than with description of and metaphysical and aesthetic meditation on what exists. (“Please, more details, I want more details” (Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social 137)). From the myopic vantage point of immersion in details of course, the causal relations of the ever more global and destructive contradictions of capitalism are placed out of view. But myopia is itself mediated by the market, rendering “to be” more and more a matter of “to have” (as Latour puts in in his Spinoza Lectures, What is the Style of Matters of Concern? 16–17), which I discuss at further length below. Truth, in contrast to both traditional Western thinking and its newer iterations in ungrounded ontologies, is not metaphysical or an empirical transcription of reality (as it is for mechanical materialism and the natural sciences), nor is it a species of what Derrida calls the “metaphysics of presence” (Of Grammatology 23) by which he makes any appeal to reliable knowledge of the world outside of language a will to power that arrests the free play of meaning. Neither is it what Karan Barad refers to as the “embodied” account of “objectivity” at the center of “agential realism” (“Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism Without Contradiction” 179–183; Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning 132–185), which is closely related to Latour’s foregrounding of “the “wandering’ of the referent” that displaces correspondence with describing chains of referents in which multiple (non)human “actants” (not Subjects and Objects of knowledge) take part (Latour, “A Perilous Change of Correspondence” (82)). The wandering referent is a strategy to make any theorization of the relation of the concrete of experience to the social totality of capitalism an exclusive and simplistic inquiry. No more “free rides through all-terrain entities like Society, Capitalism, Empire” (Reassembling the Social 137), chides Latour who, in the name of thick description of concrete singularities and its “networks,” disassembles materialist analytics—which is represented as stealing singularities’ different terrains through abstract concepts. Latour’s writings have currency because they normalize the ontology of the market—often elaborated in a playful populism, as in the (half-) parodic anti-welfare discourse with which he treats abstraction from the concrete as “free rides” of the undeserving. “The concrete is concrete,” however, “because it is the concentration of many determinations” (Marx, Introduction to Grundrisse 101).

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The concrete is itself a “false concrete” (an empty abstraction) when isolated from its deeper determinations beneath the appearances of commodity relations. The process of abstraction is not a “stealing” of particularity but an uncovering of the “rich totality of many determinations” (100) that make it possible. It is Latour who impoverishes the particular. In materialist analytics, truth is a dialectical relation to reality. “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., […] the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice” (Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach” 6). Truth, in the historical materialist sense that Marx theorizes it, depends on the existence of a material world independent of the human subject, which is objective and cognizable and scientifically known, through the development of labor. Labor makes possible the equipment, tools and knowledge that are the focus of Latour’s concern with network “actants” (Pasteurization of France 159ff) in which are disappeared labor and the labor relations that restrict the results of what social labor makes possible to the narrow interests of private property. Truthful knowledge of reality is necessary, not to dominate nature or other humans, as posthumanists contend, but to understand why (some) humans have dominated other humans and nature in the first place—to understand the historical relations that make such domination, which is not natural, metaphysical or transhistorical, possible. Without such knowledge, it is not possible to transformatively change those relations, which are normalized and naturalized by dominant classes. This “materialist epistemology seeks to develop a dialectical relationship between theories, immediate sense perception, and objective reality,” as Stephen C. Ferguson argues, which is above all necessary “[f]or those of us who want to understand the world systemically in order to change it” (“What’s Epistemology Got to Do with It?” 176). Materialism without truth, in other words, resigns one to the existing. It gives up the ability not only to know material reality beyond the appearances of commodity relations but to transform it. The undoing of truth has become more and more important in bourgeois theory as the class contradictions of capitalism have intensified in the twenty-first century.

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3.3

Three

Today, metaphysics in its most influential forms presents itself as the (re)turn to “real” or “material” existence—but, as I have said, in contrast to earlier metaphysics, being has become an unstable ground of uncertainty and the unforeseeable. This is the case, whether in the writings of those for whom reality exists independently of the human subject, like speculative realists (e.g., Quentin Meillassoux) and object-oriented ontologists (Graham Harman), or those for whom the human subject is thoroughly embedded in the world of matter, like new materialists (Bennett, Diana Coole, Samantha Frost, Karen Barad). In the speculative realist tendencies of writers like Meillassoux, whose After Finitude develops in large part through a critique of the (Leibnizian) principle of sufficient reason, being’s ungrounding is written in the language of “contingency.” In contrast to the philosophical principle that all things have a reason or a cause which makes their existence necessary, Meillassoux untethers being from its ground by making the establishment of reason in the world the product of a “correlate” of human thinking through which humanity makes the world meaningful “for us.” But the world “without us” is the time–space of “hyper Chaos” where “contingency is not only necessary,” Meillassoux argues, but “contingency alone is necessary” (After Finitude 65). To set ontological contingency free from its human correlates and foreground the ways in which everything could be “otherwise,” Meillassoux makes “breaking” with metaphysical thinking dependent on “reject[ing] all real necessity” (Meillassoux 33). The ungrounding of ontology here suspends all necessity except the ontological necessity of contingency and, in doing so, turns being into event-al existence. Although Meillassoux argues that (only) mathematics is “objective” knowledge and only it can reflect the world independent of human knowledge, thus giving his analysis a veneer of scientific knowing, Meillassoux’s math is deployed to displace historical relations and one of the main emphases of his analysis is to suspend knowledge of reality through this concept of contingency. The contingent, Meillassoux writes, “puts an end to the vanity of a game wherein everything, even the improbable, is predictable,” since that which “finally happens” in the contingent is irreducible to “all pre-registered possibilities” (108). Though formally distancing his own ontology from Meillassoux’s because it does not make contingency the primary principle of reality, Hilan Bensusan in Being Up for Grabs nonetheless also calls for an

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ontology that treats “contingencies” as “basic, as ontological primitives” (24), since “to be thrown into the world—into the sensible, concrete world—is to be thrown among the accidents” (42). In a reversal of Aristotle, for whom accidents are secondary to the substance that persists through change, Bensusan argues, “Even a substance has to dwell in accidents if it is to reach the realm of concreta” (42). Along similar lines, Gert-Jan van der Heiden calls for “an ontology of contingency,” since “to think the concept of contingency,” he argues, “is the main challenge for a thought of being today” (Ontology After Ontotheology viii). Van der Heiden associates the search for ground or reason, following Heidegger, with theology and specifically “ontotheology.” It is theological because at its core is the “metaphysical concept of God” (vii), and from this view, all concerns with “questions of principles and causes” (footnote 10, 289) are at root theological efforts to limit being. Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology “is the latest theory in the same lineage” of classical theories of substance, like Aristotle’s (Harman, Quadruple Object 18), but he produces a groundless ground along the lines of an updated Heidegger by treating all reality in terms of individual, “withdrawing” objects the “reality” of which “remains unattained by inanimate causal relations no less than by human subjects” (137). The world of human and nonhuman being is composed of individual substances (objects) which, in their essential core, remain unknowable to each other. If he qualifies contingency by saying “Not everything is contingent” (Immaterialism 15), this is not because the necessary relations of the world are assumed to determine existence, but because objects are both “individual” entities whose relations are always only ever secondary to the objects themselves, and at the same time they are objects that can never fully be known. Unlike the (speculative realist) ontologies of Meillassoux and Bensusan—which are not “substance metaphysics” (Bensusan 16)—for new materialists, being is grounded in substance, but it is a Spinozian substance of matter as contingent assemblages. The ungrounding of ontology takes the explicit form of a (re)grounding in matter and its errant and contingent interactions: in immanent being, whose ordering and determinations are not “transcendent” but determined immanently through local inter- and intra-actions. Karen Barad, who situates their project as contributing “to the founding of a new ontology, epistemology, and ethics” (Meeting the Universe Halfway 25), treats the universe as comprised of “material bodies” (139) but these material bodies are both

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“mutually entangle[d]” (33) and in a constant state of “flux.” For Barad, “matter is not a fixed essence; rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency” (183–184). Barad’s work in science and philosophy posits a similar “agency” of matter as new materialist Jane Bennett, whose Vibrant Matter “bear[s] witness to the vital materialities that flow in and through us” (x). Drawing on the ontologies of Spinoza, Deleuze and Micheal Serres, Bennett cultivates an ontological vision of “a turbulent, immanent field in which various and variable materialities collide, congeal, morph, evolve, and disintegrate” (xi). In their influential collection establishing some of the central assumptions of the “new materialisms” Diana Coole and Samantha Frost highlight the shared “emphasis on materialization as a complex, pluralistic, relatively open process and their insistence that humans, including theorists themselves, be recognized as thoroughly immersed within materiality’s productive contingencies” (New Materialisms 7). To be “immersed” in matter’s unstable and unpredictable processes, and to treat life as accident-al (life as event), for these writers, has become an “ontological primitive” (Bensuan). Accidental being, in other words, is being before human relations, and to which human relations are most “fundamentally” subject. Such discourses fashion a (philosophical) subject for whom the everyday’s material contradictions of life in capitalism—which “has become a permanent catastrophe” owing to capital’s “internal logic” (Callinicos, The New Age of Catastrophe 7)—are treated as the upendings of immanent being, or “the very vertigo of philosophy” (Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza 180). One of the main effects of such readings of ontology is to suspend the necessary relations that shape the everyday in capitalism by portraying them as relations (falsely) imposed on the world by human thought (corelates, as Meillassoux puts it). On these terms, for instance, the ratio of necessary labor and social labor in the working day that determines profit is not the outcome of necessary relations in capitalism. Which is to say, “The prolongation of the working day beyond the point at which the worker would have produced an exact equivalent for the value of his labour-power, and the appropriation of that surplus labour by capital” does not, as Marx argues, form “the general foundation of the capitalist system” (Capital I 645). Rather, capitalism could, in this speculative view, just as much function on the basis of these laws as any other. Moreover, even if such a law did operate as a law of capitalism now, there is

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nothing (ontologically) that prevents capitalism from functioning differently, according to other laws, at any other time in the future—this is the (anti-logic) of the logic of contingency, which fashions hope for a capitalism beyond capitalism. But contingency itself has a dialectical relation to the necessary. From a dialectical perspective, only in relation to the necessary can something be said to be contingent—something that may not have had to happen, or that could have been otherwise. On the other hand, the contingent can become necessary under certain conditions, and the necessary can become un-necessary. Extraction of surplus labor through wage labor was “contingent” in pre-capitalist societies—in other words, it was marginal to the functioning of society; it is essential to the functioning of capitalist society. Capital “arises only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence finds the free worker available, on the market, as the seller of his own labour-power,” which came about through a long process of complex development and conflict, and “announces from the outset a new epoch in the process of social production” (Marx, Capital I 274). The class contradictions involved in surplus value extraction are the cause not only of class inequality but one of the main contradictions that throws capitalism into greater and greater crisis—the falling rate of profit. Contingency is shaped by history, it is not an ontological given. Arguments like Meillassoux’s however turn such concepts into absolutes. Which is to say, they place them into a metaphysical beyond, a realm beyond history. In fact, Meillassoux (and some new materialists like Bennett) openly calls for a return to the “absolute”—which was intellectually discredited by the continental philosophy of the twentieth century but which has returned in the ontological turn of the twentyfirst century with a new philosophical respectability—and makes the world outside human thinking the absolute, as the “beyond” thought (“we must take up once more the injunction to know the absolute, and break with the transcendental tradition that rules out its possibility” and “become pre-critical” (After Finitude 28)). He makes “radical thought” thought that approaches the limit of human thought. But this is thought as religion. Radical thought is thought that grasps the historical roots of thought in order to change not thought but the social conditions in which thought assumes it can be free of history—the thought of the ruling classes whose existence (in contrast to their own narratives) depends not on thought but on the labor of others. The “contingent” is a philosophical strategy of class containment.

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In one ungrounded ontological tendency (speculative realism), the concern is with philosophical speculation on the absolute, which sanctions the ability to address the objective world independent of the subject’s frame of reference. In the other (new materialism), it is the concern with the embeddedness of the human subject in matter and the inability of the human to separate itself from the world in which they are entangled. Both tendencies, in their different iterations, are ungrounded in a double sense: what constitutes reality in these ontologies is metaphysical (not material or objective) and excessive of any determining relations, and, consequently, humanity is decentered and re-situated (again) in an unstable, immaterial reality to which one must submit and relinquish the analytics of totality. The analytics of totality is at the core of social ontology, the theoretical dismantling of which is one of the main effects of ungrounded ontologies. Social ontology is the materialist (re)grounding of metaphysical treatments of being, since being is not (as it is in ruling class metaphysics) untethered from the social relations of production. In his writing on ontology, Lukács foregrounds social ontology as the “science of history” (Ontology of Social Being 10): the analysis of the dialectical relation of human labor and nature through which humans meet their needs and develop new ones, and the property relations that determine ownership and control over the products of labor and the material resources on which society depends. Lukács of course is developing Marx’s social ontology, which traces the relations of production in all forms of social existence, and reveals their contradictory relation to the forces of production, which, as they develop, come into conflict with existing property relations. The most comprehensive statement of social ontology as a science of history is perhaps Marx’s theorization of the principle guiding his analysis of the social: In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations that are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social

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existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. (Preface, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 263)

Dominant ontologies are dominant because they invert the material relation of consciousness and being, to base truth in the otherworld of the spiritual. The “task of history, therefore,” Marx writes, “is to establish the truth of this world” (Introduction, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law 176). Establishing the truth of this world requires conceptual knowledges of the necessary relations that structure it. The fact that truth is always mediated by culture and language does not make truth cultural or linguistic, which is to mistake the medium in which something is expressed for the expressed content. Truth is the determination of culture and language not by themselves or by nature or politics, but by the mode of production. Materialist analytics explains why the contradiction at capitalism’s core, between those who sell their labor to survive and those who exploit the labor of the other, between use value (human need) and exchange value (profit), is continually producing ever more global and destructive crises, and like other modes of production capitalism will itself be negated. Socialism, as Rosa Luxemburg argues, “is humanity’s only salvation” (“Speeches and Letters on War and Revolution, 1918–19” 350). In other words, “either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; or, by the victory of socialism, that is, the conscious struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism, its methods, against war” (The Janius Pamphlet: The Crisis in German Social Democracy 321). Whether the contradictions of capital result “either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes” (Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party 482) will be determined by the development of an international, class-conscious working class. That is, the extent to which revolutionary theory “becomes a material force” and “is gripped by the masses” (Marx,

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Introduction, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law 182)—a prospect that bourgeois theory class-consciously aims to destroy. What is presented as a radical acceptance of radical instability in contemporary ontology is a class tranquilizer. It treats the instability that pervades life under capitalism as (ontologically) prior to capitalist relations, the implication of which is that such instability will (like the poor) “always be with us.”

3.4

Four

The ungrounding of ontology, to repeat, marks a shift in dominant theories of being in the modern era. It develops in the late nineteenth century as a response to the deepening economic contradictions of capitalism, whose ontology of “everlasting uncertainty and agitation,” driven by the “revolt” of the productive forces against the existing relations of production (Manifesto of the Communist Party 489), leads to the evermore “fundamental” questioning of ontological foundations themselves. Its most vigorous philosophic voice is of course Nietzsche. Writing in an era of economic and social crises in the imperialist relations of capitalism that would lead to the First World War, Nietzsche’s writing subjected traditional Western philosophy to a sustained critique that borders on the militant. Nietzsche, as Dmitri G. Safronov writes, “completed most of his writing against the backdrop of the Long Depression (1873–1896)—the first ‘truly international’ crisis of the political economy of industrial capitalism” (Nietzsche’s Political Economy 1). But Nietzsche is not, as Safronov suggests, a critic of capitalist political economy, he rather updates philosophy and bourgeois ontology for an emerging era of crisis and global expansion of capitalism, which is why Nietzsche remains a voice immanent (if not explicit) in most contemporary ungrounded ontologies, from textualism to speculative realism and new materialism. Central to Nietzsche’s deconstruction of metaphysics (which endears him to Heidegger) is of course that he dismantles all of its foundations in reason and its categories. Nietzsche in this regard saw in Spinoza his own “precursor” (Letter to Overbeck July 30, 1881), which underpins Jonathan Israel’s claim that “Spinoza’s philosophy constitutes a re-evaluation of all values” (Spinoza, Life and Legacy 6). Nietzsche inherits Spinoza’s philosophy, however, not in the sense of reaching a closer ground of truth through reason. Reason, as portrayed by Nietzsche, authorizes philosophy’s production of totalizing categories like

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substance and truth that erase the nature of being as “becoming,” which in turn reduces the freedom of the individual, a limiting of the will to power. Truth, for Nietzsche, is “Inertia” (Will to Power 291). To be clear, Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values dismisses truth as a correspondence of thought and reality (whether ideal or material) with the claim that “there simply is no true world” (Will to Power 14). But Nietzsche’s problem with truth has a close relation to the (“new”) way he casts ontology. The “precondition of every living thing and its life” for Nietzsche must involve not belief in but fundamental “doubt concerning all essential values” (276). He continues: ‘The real and the apparent world’—I have traced this antithesis back to value relations. We have projected the conditions of our preservation as predicates of being in general. Because we have to be stable in our beliefs if we are to prosper, we have made the ‘real’ world a world not of change and becoming, but one of being…. (276)

Like “truth,” “relations” in the world, are mere fictions imposed by humans in their effort to “prosper,” a struggle which is for Nietzsche not historical but transhistorical (the “eternal return”). Value, however, is a material relation (“The secret of the expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour because and insofar as they are human labour in general” (Marx, Capital I 152)), and the material relations of (economic) value determine social values. The material relations of value become, in Nietzsche’s writing, reversed, and modes of thought imposed on the world appear as determining material relations. In humans’ struggle for existence, relations between “truth” and “lies,” “realty” and “appearance” are produced in order to “fix” the world as a basis of knowledge. But, for Nietzsche, “Knowledge and becoming exclude one another” (276). In such claims, Nietzsche not only dematerializes value but at a more abstract level translates the increasingly unpredictable and crisis-ridden relations of capital, which are expressions of the law of value, into a theory of being as becoming, which is placed beyond human knowledge. The world as becoming cannot be known except through “coarse” attempts to grasp what is presented to the senses, and what in Derrida will become, in a more subtle discourse of textuality, the “arresting” of the play of the signifier (Of Grammatology). Nietzsche’s wide-ranging critique of philosophy dismantled all efforts to know the objective world by appeal to truth grounded in capacity

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of reason to know the world beyond the appearances of experience, with significant implications beyond just the Enlightenment project. He represented the effects of the deepening contradictions of capitalism in ontological terms of the event, insisting “any comprehensive unity in the plurality of events is lacking” (Will to Power 13). The vigor and militant language with which Nietzsche critiques Western philosophy have therefore led many left readers to interpret Nietzsche as opposing capitalism and class. But his is a critique of the culture of capitalism, of the “sad” effects of the market and its instability, a critique whose theoretical sharpness derives more from his aristocratic gaze. This updating is in fact more effective because it is developed through a critique of capitalism. However, like the broader post-68 left discourses, Nietzsche is primarily critical of the instrumental and most egregious forms of oppression of capitalism, not its economic logic. He challenges the market, for instance, in such claims as “all that is great” happens “far away from the market-place” (“The Flies in the MarketPlace”, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (164)). In actuality, however, he gives the economic logic a new philosophical garb. This is nowhere more clear than in his theorization of becoming as “life itself [as] essentially a process of appropriating, injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker, oppression, being harsh, imposing your own form, incorporate and at least, the very least, exploiting” (Beyond Good and Evil 153)—a notion of “life” invigorated by (Spinozian) “conatus .” The exploitation that takes place through the exchange of labor power for wages is, on these naturalizing terms, an extension of the ontology of becoming. Becoming turns out to be overcoming (the other). Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, as the height of the nihilism Nietzsche diagnoses, is, as I mentioned, part of Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of being. Although in his “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger challenged humanism on the grounds that it is “either grounded in metaphysics or is itself made to be the ground of one” (225) and therefore questioned the “necessity” of “restor[ing] meaning to the word ‘humanism’” (219), his broader concern was to establish the truth of being and to make possible the unveiling of Being, which is itself an updating of theosophy. Despite the ways in which the being to whom this unveiling is unconcealed shifts in Heidegger’s writing from Dasein, as the human being for whom Being is a question, to a post-subjective theory—“if understanding is taken as a kind of determining recognition

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of the inner ‘lived experiences’ of a ‘subject’ and the one who understands is accordingly taken as an I-subject, then a grasp of what is meant by the understanding of being is doomed to failure” (Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) 204)—Heidegger’s treatment of being has come under critical scrutiny for its delineation of the human and the nonhuman. Heidegger, for instance, is interpreted as “uncritically accept[ing] two basic tenets of ontotheological anthropocentrism: that human beings and animals can be clearly and cleanly distinguished in their essence; and that such a distinction between human beings and animals even needs to be drawn” (Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal From Heidegger to Derrida 30). Today, in other words, the remaking of ungrounded ontology is presented by contemporary advocates as a necessary move beyond human-centered thinking and being. “The human being,” Graham Harman writes, “is now firmly established as the point of entry for all serious philosophy, even if redefined as a pure ego, linguistic agent, embodied animal, subject of power-plays, or historically rooted Dasein. The notion of an objective world-in-itself seems to elude our grasp” (“Quentin Meillassoux” 105). For Harman the need to move beyond humanism to open philosophy to the world-in-itself is necessary to move beyond the philosophical narcissism that assumes humans are not themselves (like everything else) objects that are, in their core, unknowable. As Ray Brassier and others have pointed out, “the immediate consequence of adopting this full-blown object-oriented immanence is that we cannot say what anything really is” nor that objects are not something quite different than what Harman claims (“Deleveling” 69), though Brassier’s critique is more of a family quarrel within realism. Harman’s views are closely related to Meillasoux’s speculative realism. In his critique of “correlationism,” Meillassoux argues that philosophy— even in its most radically anti-transcendentalist forms—has remained heir to Kant’s post-critical tradition which makes the world inaccessible to human knowledge (the “things in themselves”). By placing “things in themselves” beyond human knowledge, the Kantian tradition restricts the world to its correlate in the human mind—the implication of which is that the “world without me” exists to the extent it can be made a world “for me” in a relation of givenness to subjectivity. Correlationism assumes “we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (After Finitude 5). From this standpoint, the critique of “representation” (in textualist and

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culturalist theories), by positing the linguistic and cultural construction of the world, implies “a more originary correlation between thought and being” (8). In other words, they posit the human (signification)-world relation as more originary than the world (as being) itself. As a result, they “have not signaled a break with correlation” (6). Textual indeterminacy and its critique of essentializing of identity and the grounding of truth in a transcendental signified, on these terms, prevented analysis of what lies outside language, and in doing so, shielded itself from a more essential, even “fundamental” indeterminacy. Meillassoux, in the attempt to break out of the “correlates” of human thinking through which the world has been thought (and which imposes “necessary” relations on the world), calls for philosophy to seek the “great outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers: that outside which was not relative to us, and which was given as indifferent to its own givenness to be what it is, existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not” (7) of the things themselves, which involves, in turn, a willingness to return to the notion of the “absolute” and makes the task of philosophy the speculation on this absolute, which is “not absolutizing” because (unlike the absolutes of traditional philosophy that rooted the absolute in necessary being) it is the principle hyper Chaos. According to new materialists, who are more concerned with the ethical and political implications of humanism than speculative realists and object-oriented philosophers, the move beyond humanism is needed to address what Rosi Braidotti refers to as the “un-acknowledged anthropocentrism” or “species hierarchy” of the traditional and the more recent critical posthumanities of the linguistic and cultural turns (“Transversal Posthumanities” 1183; 1181). De-centering of the human is needed, theorists argue, to respond to emerging realities that throw into relief, not humanity’s exceptionalism and independence from but rather dependence on nonhuman life, and to address the catastrophic environmental consequences of humanity’s consumerism and its selfish deployment of science and technology for humanity’s sake: to challenge “human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption” (Bennett, Vibrant Matter ix). “For some time,” Bennett writes, “political theory has acknowledged that materiality matters. But this materiality most often refers to human social structures or to the human meanings ‘embodied’ in them and other objects. Because politics is itself often construed as an exclusively human domain, what registers on it is a set of material constraints on or a context

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for human action” (xvi). On these posthumanist terms, the main limit of previous social critiques of humanism, like the limit of historical materialism, is that they are concerned about the inscription of the social on matter or the way in which matter resists human thought, rather than attending to matter itself, prior to its inscription or mediation by humans; to the extent that it is a stage of human constraint or agency, this also limits the way in which politics itself is understood (“How would political responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies?” (Bennett viii)). Earlier critical discourses emerging in the 1970s critiqued the essentialism of humanism, exposing the power relations that the discourse of the “human” concealed. They addressed not the species exceptionalism of humanism but the universalizing assumptions of its essentialism and its exclusion of difference, which masked social and historical structures. However, for contemporary posthumanist theorists, the previous critiques of humanism did not go far enough in their decentering of the human and perpetuated some of humanism’s most problematic assumptions. They remained focused on epistemological not ontological concerns (“knowledge-power” relations not “being”). In this posthumanist vein, Braidotti writes for instance that while “Women’s, gay and lesbian, gender, feminist and queer studies, race, postcolonial and subaltern studies, alongside cultural studies, film, television and media studies, and science and technology studies constitute the radical epistemologies that have voiced the insights and knowledge of the structural ‘others’ of the humanistic ‘Man of reason’ (Lloyd 1984),” “their anthropocentrism is so intrinsic as to remain unthought-of and therefore under-examined” (1182–1183). Addressing the social and historical relations of the human and its relation with nonhuman others is to engage in species-ism. Of course, the critical discourses Braidotti mentions did address such matters of nature and nonhuman life—but they foregrounded the way social intelligibilities always frame them, which the interests of the powerful seek to conceal. But for posthumanism, this focus on social intelligibility neglects more pervasive yet concealed power relations by which humans center themselves in the world and thus obscured a “deeper” reality beyond human thought. Consequently, in the posthumanist re-orientation of thought since the late 1990s, theorists of being have concerned themselves with the question of “How to return to being after this long and problematizing inquiry into the medium in which being is said? How to break the spell

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of language and force one’s way into the question of being?” (Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Ontology After Ontotheology 3). I argue that this is ultimately a desire to return to a higher ground: not the material relations of social life, but a spiritual realm of metaphysics in which divisions that can’t be materially resolved are resolved in the imaginary. “Nature is man’s inorganic body—nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature—means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature” (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 276). Human’s “separation” from nature is, in other words, historical and material, not metaphysical, not simply a mode of thinking. The relations of private property, in estranging human beings from their object of labor and productive activity, also estrange human beings from nature. “In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labour estranges the species from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life” (276). Posthumanism’s framing as a turn away from the “human” is an ethical framing that conceals its determination by social, material relations. The question of “how” to return to “being” displaces the question of why the “detour” happened in the first place. If humans have become seemingly ineluctably individual-centered, this does not derive from humans’ innate narcissism, as new materialists suggest—i.e., a fixation on the (human) self. Humans’ concern with the self at the expense of other humans and nature more broadly are concrete effects of historical relations in which the existence of the vast majority of people on the planet, owning little but their own labor power, are compelled to sell it to the owners of private property, whose accumulation of social wealth enables them to control the direction of all production toward further expansion of private property. The bourgeois imperative to privately accumulate produces its inversion in the propertyless whose relation to production ensures the struggle for individual subsistence, the outcome of which is that the “individual life in its abstract form” becomes “the purpose of the life of the species” (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 276). Bourgeois philosophy, inverting the material and ideal, re-makes material relations of property as mere “states” of thought or as mere “theoretical attitude[s]” (282), i.e., transhistorical, universal “conditions” of “humanity” not the result of historical social arrangements.

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As van der Heiden’s language indicates, posthumanist oriented ontologies treat “humanism” as primarily a mode of thinking—a “spell” that somehow captured dominant thinking in the West. The task, then, becomes breaking the spell with new modes of thinking. Neither humanism nor posthumanism, however, are primarily modes of thinking. Both are relays of private property relations. “Humanism and posthumanism,” to put this differently, “are cultural representations of property relations that normalize wage labor, the main obstacle to social transformation” (Cotter et al., Introduction, Human, All Too (Post)human 2). Far from representing a radical break from humanism, posthumanism is “humanism’s latent side: the difference of humanism with itself as it adjusts to the heightening class contradictions in the shift from analog to digital capitalism” (1–2). What has made being itself appear so “accidental” as to make accidentalism an “ontological primitive” (Bensusan) is caused by the crisis of Western capitalism that began in the late 1960s. During the Long Boom (1950–1974), profitability in the advanced capitalist nations, through which accumulation and economic growth developed alongside increased wages and living conditions and social programs for much of the working class, led to the “compromise” of labor and capital. During this period, Murray E. G. Smith, Jonah Butovsky and Josh Watterton argue, “productivity and real hourly wages in the private, non-farm U.S. economy grew in lockstep” (Twilight Capital 52). After this, with the fall in profitability of capital that started in the early 1970s, these diverged, and the increasing gap between working class and capitalists in the global north began. This reached a high point in the early 1980s, when, owing to pressure from capital to crush labor’s resistance to capital’s effort to increase the rate of exploitation, and exacerbated by a recession, Regan used the state to crush the striking air traffic controllers, Thatcher to suppress the striking miners. The divergence of productivity and wages was caused by the decreasing rate of profit on capitalist investment in production, which began in the early 1970s. The rate of profit and the tendency to decline in capitalism over the long term is one of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, and it reveals the irreconcilability of capitalism and society. Capital depends for its existence on the exploitation of surplus value, which is produced by living labor at the point of production. But, since capital can only survive by expanding surplus value, in competition with other capitalists for dominance in the market, capitalism increases the rate

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of extraction of surplus value—decreasing necessary labor time (for which the worker is compensated) and increasing the time spent producing surplus value for which the worker is not compensated—through introduction of increasingly advanced technologies (that “save labor”). But the more investment in this technology (constant capital), the less investment in the very “substance” that produces surplus value—living labor (variable capital). Marx: “The progressive tendency of the general rate of profit to fall is….just an expression peculiar to the capitalist mode of production of the progressive development of the social productive power of labour” (Capital III 211). This contradiction has shaped global capitalism since the late 1960s and ushered in the policies associated with neoliberalism. In the advanced capitalist centers of the global north the policies associated with LBJ’s “Great Society”—from investment in education, health care and social security to the Civil Rights Act and the development of NASA (e.g., liberal capitalism)—for example, were possible because of the high rate of profit and the growth of productivity. As capitalism began to face crises deriving from its own contradictory relations, such programs— which were based on the transfer of social wealth from labor to the state, where it was redistributed—were no longer supported by capital, which sought to limit the social wealth returning to labor and to lower the cost of reproducing labor. At a more fundamental level, neoliberal capitalism deepened exploitation of absolute surplus value primarily in the global south and relative surplus value in the global north. In the south, it appropriated the surplus value of workers in colonized and formerly colonized countries with cheap labor and few labor regulations, and in the north it intensified exploitation of (higher waged, more tightly regulated) labor through machines. Through introducing increasingly advanced technologies to make labor more productive, faster, more flexible conditions of extraction of surplus labor were created in the postwar era—from the Fordist assembly line, which deployed the Taylorist scientific management theory to the increasingly flexible forms of management that eventually became associated with Toyota-ification and workplaces finely-tuned to on-demand production. The long-term labor contracts that were central to production of mass-produced commodities—which made possible the “compromise” of labor and capital—were increasingly transformed into temporary and precarious labor contracts, especially after the oil crisis and the severing of the dollar from the gold standard, both of which signaled the falling rate of profit capital faced (again) in

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the 1960s and 1970s. Neoliberalism thus “inflicted a series of severe defeats on the organized working class, restricted production, thereby facilitating the industrialization of parts of the South (a process that had, however, started much earlier and was promoted by decolonization), and relentlessly commodified all spheres of life” (Callinicos, The New Age of Catastrophe 3). In the discourses of textuality, difference and culture, capital’s need for more flexible modes of extraction of surplus value and an increasingly expanding market to sell goods produced at larger scales were translated in left theory into the critique of essentialism, universalism and totality and the prioritization of difference and heterogeneity. On the one hand, they demonstrated how traditional theory masked its power relations behind an essentialist discourse of the human/humanism. On the other hand, especially as neoliberalism developed, this was not developed in the name of emancipation from exploitation. Instead, the arguments advanced the notion that difference within oppositions already existed but was covered over by humanism and its discourses pitting binaries against each other (difference between). The implication was that capitalism and its class binary between workers and owners, exploited and exploiters, need not be transformed to live one’s different identity, and consumerism became a means of expressing difference. Capital’s relentless pursuit of profit in the face of ever more destructive and global crises—from climate change and epidemics killing millions each year and driving new relations of immigration, to the deepening social and political inequalities produced by the division of property owners and the propertyless, who are always subject to capital’s brutal demands of productivity—has made new discourses of ontology necessary. In the contemporary relations of capitalism, most prominently following the 2007–2008 economic crisis, left theory is under more and more pressure to return to the world outside of language and culture that dictates life on an increasingly impoverished scale for the many. Yet it is a return to a more sophisticated idealism. Instead of addressing the material relations of capitalism, it is “being” and “matter” themselves that are posited as the “more fundamental” reality to which theory must address itself. To clarify what I have argued thus far: The first stage of posthumanism, in a transitional moment of the shift from liberal to neoliberal capitalism, set the terms for a wider dismantling of knowledge and totality on theoretical and epistemological grounds—through the discourses of textuality and culture. Derrida, one of capital’s most sophisticated and nuanced

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theorists, updates Nietzsche, treating binary terms (like working class and capitalist) not as difference between but difference within the two terms, each as the difference of the other, to render meaning subject, not to the laws of profit accumulation, but to textual indeterminacy, one of the effects of which was to destabilize meaning and the humanist subject (presumed to be master) of language. This was part of the wider movement in cultural theory to ensure that any effort to ground meaning “outside” of language and culture, in the material relations of exploitation, was read in terms of what Lyotard called “grand narratives” concealing “totalitarian” desire (a “metaphysics” of the “transcendental signified” in Derrida’s more subtle writing). For contemporary theorists of being, such forms of posthumanism didn’t go far enough. The return to ontology, in the newer posthumanist wave, is a return to metaphysics on higher level, and the invention of a new (post)human subjectivity. However, like the older (neoliberal) era of posthumanist theories of knowledge and subjectivity, which were themselves an outcome of the changes in the mode of accumulation at the point of production that were translated into a new notion of subjectivity in a centerless world, contemporary posthumanism reflects deepening contradictions in capitalism and its need for new ways to normalize the priority of profit as the material conditions of workers globally deteriorate.

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Five

Neoliberal social relations of capital, I have argued, have shaped the first and the second posthumanist waves of cultural theory. But contradictions of capitalism in the twenty-first century require new modes of naturalizing class and normalizing private property relations. As Arturo Escobar writes in discussing the ontological turn, the “deconstruction” of the “nature and culture” divide “started in the 1980s” with such writers as Haraway and Latour, whereas “The more recent scholarship […] makes a concerted effort at reconnecting nature and culture, and humans and nonhumans” (Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, Duke University Press, 2018). The ontological turn’s turn to the real and to the material, I argue, is an imaginary resolution of the social relations of production that, in dividing human subject of labor from the objective of production, also divide humans from each other and from nature. This imaginary resolution is seductive because it purports to address the world outside human

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consciousness while making that world a new metaphysical zone in which the productive power of labor is distributed to all matter, which is to say that it reproduces the economic (ideo)logic of cognitive capitalism. I focus in what follows on the writing of Jane Bennett, whose Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010) is part of the material turn in the early 2000s, emerging just after the major economic crisis of 2007–2008, and quickly becoming a central work of new materialism in the twenty-first century. It emerges at a time of the collapse of what was assumed to be endless financial growth, intensification of productivity and the flooding of world markets with cheap products, especially in rich nations, alongside global conflicts, widespread environmental destruction and deepening economic divisions between rich and poor. Elaborating a “positive ontology of vibrant matter” (x), the book’s approach to matter has helped to establish an influential new language in which to talk about the things that dominate people’s lives and their relations with nonhuman life. The book’s influence derives from the way Bennett integrates Deleuze’s Spinozian-infused readings of matter, conatus and assemblages with Latourian actants and networks, giving them a new ethical and ecological valence by re-situating them within a contemporary posthumanist framework that addresses such diverse issues as garbage, blackouts, biological matter, gun violence and prolife discourses. In doing so, she updates an early bourgeois speculative materialism for an increasingly interconnected yet conflictual era that requires a “return” to “material” reality that (once again) sidelines the class relations of capitalism. One of the most important contributions to ungrounded ontology is the way Vibrant Matter’s sidelining of class fashions ways of “seeing” matter that ontologize commodity relations— “which bear the unmistakable stamp of belonging to a social formation in which the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite” and which appear to “bourgeois consciousness to be … a self-evident and nature-imposed necessity” (Capital I 174–175). Affirmation of the inverted appearances of the market is rendered essential to a posthumanist, ecological ethics. Bennett’s “vibrant materialism” is presented as an exciting and even urgent new way to think about the material world. Echoing earlier materialisms, Bennett’s ontology posits all things as comprised of matter. However, matter, for Bennett, is not inert or passive, as it has been theorized in mechanical materialism—it is not, as she puts it, “dead” or “inert” and nor therefore is it simply there to be acted upon by

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humans. It instead it possesses a “life” of its own, or agential powers. Bennett’s approach to matter, consequently, challenges some of the basic assumptions underwriting classical accounts of matter in the early modern era. In Principles of Philosophy, for instance, Descartes—who stands for new materialists as the exemplar of humanist philosophers of matter—defines matter as extension (res extensa), the physical properties of which are perceptible: “the nature of matter, or body considered in general, consists not in its being something which is hard or heavy or coloured, or which affects the senses in any way, but simply in its being something which is extended in length, breadth and depth” (Part II, 224). In Bennett’s new materialism, the perceptual qualities of matter are integral to the human subject’s engagement with matter. Discerning the “vitality” of matter, Bennett argues, involves “a sensory attentiveness to the qualitative singularities of the object” (14). For Descartes, however, the physical attributes of matter that are available to the senses, as phenomenal appearances, do not coincide with the substance of which they are attributes. Substance is theorized by reasoning, which draws from but is not reducible to experiential knowledge of the world, since “the grasp of the senses is very obscure and confused” (Descartes, Meditations VI, 55). This did not of course stop him from conducting experiments in natural science through which to understand, for instance, the laws of motion and blood circulation. In his rendering of the working of the heart in Discourse on Method, he provides a rather detailed account of the blood and its movement through the body (for the seventeenth century), writing of the parts of the blood that “we need suppose no cause other than the fact that they are carried there by the arteries which come most directly from the heart,” which functions “according to the laws of mechanics, which are identical with the laws of nature” (Discourse, Part V, 138–139). Following his theorization of the three laws of motion in Part II of Principles of Philosophy, he writes that “my consideration of [corporeal] matter involves absolutely nothing apart from these divisions, shapes and motions” that geometry and mathematics explains, since “I do not think that any other principles are either admissible or desirable in physics” (Part II, 247). Cartesian dualism leads of course in two different directions. In his metaphysics, Descartes made God the origin of the universe and the basis of the reasoning subject. In his materialism, which challenged the Church and helped advance early modern science, on the other hand, Descartes

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rejects any supernatural cause animating the system of the blood (it is not necessary to “suppose” any other “cause” than “mechanic” rules). For Bennett, such mechanical theories of matter are limited, not because they are not dialectical—not, in other words, because they deny the way in which consciousness is a dialectical result of the relation of the material world and labor. Instead, it is because Cartesian materialism denies what makes matter “vibrant” or an agent in the world. “Thingpower” is Bennett’s name for this agency that exists intrinsic to all matter, not just human subjects: “the agentic contributions of nonhuman forces (operating in nature, in the human body, and in human artifacts)” (xvi). This “material vibrancy” (xiv) inherent in matter, its “active powers” (ix), has been ignored in “modern” thought, she argues, because of its “habit of parsing the world into dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us, being)” (vii). On these terms, mechanical materialism like Descartes’s, denies agency to matter on the basis of its binary framework, establishing such dualisms as “life/matter, human/animal, will/determination, organic/inorganic” (x). Such thinking separates matter from human reason and subjectivity and makes the human subject uniquely capable of knowing the world and mastering the laws of nature, for the benefit of humanity. Which is to say it supports a “vertical” ontology at the top of which is the human being. In contrast, Bennett’s project is to develop a “flatter,” non-dualist, non-mechanical materialism that overcomes such binaries and their privileging of the human subject, developing a new “grammar” to highlight this power, to theorize a vitality intrinsic to “materiality as such” (69). There is, however, no “materiality as such”—this is a metaphysical abstraction to which matter is reduced. Matter is not the result of divine substance, an expression of a metaphysical principle, or textual or corporeal substance. It is not spontaneous or free from determination. Its determination is not supernatural or transcendental but historical. Matter designates the world independent of human consciousness, not the world independent of human history (contra the posthumanists). The world independent of the consciousness of the individual is a world thoroughly produced and mediated by the practices and relations of human labor. As Teresa Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh argue, “Matter is objective reality in history—materialism; it is not corporeality—matterism. … Matter is the shared property of the totality of different and transforming elements, historical processes, and social practices; these are independent from the will of the individual and exist in conflicts (motion) objectively outside the

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consciousness of the agent” (42). As they also argue, one of the strategies by which objective, historical relations are disappeared by the left is by “dispersing” matter into the “substance” of culture, signs, affect…., separating matter from its historical relations. Bennett’s materialism rejects historical materialist explanation of the prioritizing of the subject of reason or the accumulation of things in gutters or oceans on the grounds that it is rigid and human centered. According to Bennett, historical materialism not only “relies on the trope of fixity” by arguing that economic relations “determine” culture (58), but its concern with “demystification”—by which the market is revealed to invert the relation of people and things in commodity relations, knowledge of which is necessary for becoming class conscious agents—“tends to screen from view the vitality of matter and to reduce political agency to human agency” (xv). At the same time, Bennett distinguishes her materialism from (overtly) religious approaches to matter, writing that what she calls the “vibrancy” of matter “is not a spiritual supplement or ‘life force’ added to the matter said to house it. Mine is not a vitalism in the traditional sense; I equate affect with materiality, rather than posit a separate force that can enter and animate a physical body” (xiv). Bennett suggests that what makes a theory “spiritual” is its positing of an external force that determines an entity, in a reversal of Cartesian mechanical materialism. On these terms, vibrant materialism is not spiritualist because the agency it assigns matter is within matter: its agency is “immanent.” This is, however, a form of theosophy. The concept of “immanence” derives from the Latin inl manere (“remaining within”) (“Immanence,” Historical Materialism 239). Following Spinoza, new materialists like Bennett treat immanent ontology as materialist insofar as it is the other of transcendentalism. Substance (or God or Nature), Spinoza writes, “is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things” (EIP18, 428). This follows from his theory of substance according to which “Everything that is, is in God” and there is no “thing which is outside God” (IP18, 428), making the notion of a God that exists outside of natural and human existence a “fiction” rooted in humanity’s own “end”-oriented existence, as he puts it in his famous Appendix to Part I of the Ethics (442). On these terms, at the most primordial level, only by treating the conditions of existence as “immanent” rather than “transcendental” (divine, otherworldly) does life become life of this world, not the “otherworldly.” While immanent

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being was a form of naturalism through which, along with Cartesian mechanics, bourgeois philosophy in the time of the (post) Renaissance helped to advance science by positing it as material and governed by the laws of nature, and thus as the object of knowledge, it was and remains a naturalism devoid of historical relations—a historylessness it shares with mechanical materialism. But there is no matter or substance that exists in a state of “within”—a state without relations. This is a religious notion of the ground of existence. Nonetheless, this speculative and isolating theory of matter has become the foundation of a posthumanist, ecological approach to the material world. Left readers like Warren Montag (who obliquely informs new materialism, as an earlier form of “new” materialism that uses Spinoza to rewrite the relation of base/superstructure), for instance, argue that by theorizing substance as God or Nature, Spinoza ensures that God is not separate from or standing over and determining his creations but is in that which is produced. Instead, “substance is ‘its’ infinite diversity itself; it is realized in this diversity and is nothing other than the process of production without beginning or end (beyond teleology, without goals or direction) of itself through the infinity of its attributes” (The New Spinoza xvi). “Spinoza rejects every notion of a God who exists prior to or outside of his creation, and thus every form of theological transcendence” and instead puts forward a view according to which “mind and body are the same thing” (Bodies, Masses, Power xvi–xvii). There is no outside power or force “above” nature. Spinoza’s treatment of all the world (of “singular things”) as “modes” of the same substance is of course the basis of univocity—the diversity of life constituted by the same single essence. Spinoza writes of modes that they are the “affections of a substance, or that which is in another through which it is also conceived” (EID5, 409), and that there are “infinitely many modes” that necessarily follow from substance as “divine nature” (EIP16, 424). Deleuze says: “That God produces ‘an infinity of things in an infinity of modes’ (Ethics, I, 16) means that effects are indeed things, that is, real beings which have an essence and existence of their own, but do not exist and have no being apart from the attributes in which they are produced. In this way, there is a univocity of Being (attributes), although that which is (of which Being is affirmed) is not at all the same (substance or modes)” (Spinoza 91).

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Such interpretations assume that a metaphysical essence can produce a material (nonspiritual) matter. But this is, I say it again, a theological narrative: a narrative of flesh and bones created by the divine; the immortal becoming mortal, etc. It assumes an inherently spiritual essence as the basis of all that exists. Spinoza’s propositions may lead him to treat matter as functioning through its own causal series without an external force determining the modes and modal interaction. But this is the way in which Spinoza disperses divine substance, rather than negates God. I mention here that “external” has become widely associated in cultural theory since the 1970s with “transcendence”—which is to say it is interpreted, following Deleuze, spatially and more specifically vertically, as a will to power. Through the conflation of “external” and “transcendence” all theories that posit the concrete as determined from its outside— whether by religious or historical materialist theories—are rejected in left thought as forms of transcendentalism (if not “totalitarianism”). There is at the core of such readings of “external” and “outside” a deep and enduring populism. Like all populisms, it serves, in the name of the “people,” the interests of the powerful by absorbing class relations in experience. Placing the concrete beyond critique and rejecting all analyses that situate the “inside” in relation to the “outside,” analysis from the outside is represented by populism as “suppressing” the local and its authenticity (e.g., the theoretical operations of “outside agitators”). In contrast to those, like Stephen C. Ferguson, who defend a “scientific, that is, materialist, epistemology [which] requires the mediation of theory, in order to understand our immediate experience” and the way it is shaped by exploitation and oppression (“What’s Epistemology Got to Do with It?” 183), Bennett rejects knowledge from the outside of experience, arguing that concepts like demystification (which reveal the way commodity relations normalize the exploitation of labor, the material relations beneath the false appearances) are based on a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Vibrant Matter xv), a concept of Paul Ricoeur (Freud and Philosophy 7 ). Like Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, who argue for “[s]urface reading, which strives to describe texts accurately” with “the accent on immersion in texts” against the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (“Surface Reading: An Introduction” 16), Bennett treats critique as hostile to the immanence of experience. But Bennett updates the familiar rejection of ideology critique—without which no serious social movement beyond commodity relations can develop. For Bennett, the main problem is ethical: its human-centered focus. “What demystification uncovers is

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always something human, for example, the hidden quest for domination on the part of some humans over others, a human desire to deflect responsibility for harms done, or an unjust distribution of (human) power” (xvi) and “works against the possibility of positive formulations” (xvi). The unsaid of the posthumanist rejection of demystification is the unsaid of earlier rejections: that the only acceptable “positive formulations” are those within the ontological horizon of capitalism. What is necessary, according to Bennet, is to bring the vitality of matter itself out of the purported shadows of human agency, and to re-orient human politics around a posthumanist notion of agency of all matter. What, then, does her writing bring to light? It will be useful to turn to a few passages from Bennett’s Vibrant Matter. The passages relate to the “encounter” with “thing-power” that is set at the very beginning of the book, establishing some of the main concepts and implications of Bennett’s new materialism. Despite her suggestion that a limit of her own concept of “thing-power” developed there is that it is too focused on “individual” things rather than their “confederate” agency, “thing-power” in fact articulates the logic of new materialism’s deeper assumptions about matter and agency. Describing a new materialist ontological awakening as she is walking in Baltimore, Bennett writes about her encounter with things in a grate on the sidewalk: one one one one one

large men’s black plastic work glove dense mat of oak pollen unblemished dead rat white plastic bottle cap smooth stick of wood[.] (4)

The encounter is not a pastoral scene of primarily natural nonhuman objects, nor does it make nature, as Heidegger did, the scene of the “clearing” in the forest in which the truth of Being is disclosed (an ontology of nationalism). It is a fundamentally urban scene. In contrast, however, to more familiar urban scenes of exuberant consumption, agoras of cultural difference, or scenes where such issues as poverty are central, the scene is one of “debris.” “As I encountered these items,” Bennett continues, “they shimmied back and forth between debris and

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thing—between, on the one hand, stuff to ignore, except insofar as it betokened human activity (the workman’s efforts, the litterer’s toss, the rat-poisoner’s success), and, on the other hand, stuff that commanded attention in its own right, as existents in excess of their association with human meanings, habits, or projects” (4). As debris, things are associated with their human meanings and production and as that which does not “command attention.” As things, they are significant as things-in-themselves, exceeding human designations and their conditions of production and discarding. The same object appears (to her) in simultaneously opposed manners, “shimmying” back and forth between them. Whereas the first moment overlooks the vibrancy of the things themselves, the second is made possible by a willingness to suspend the human centering, to see through the lenses of others (like Thoreau and Wordsworth and others like Thomas Dumm and Latour) to be “surprised” by what she sees (5, 27). She had to be “open” to seeing things in their thing-power, which she suggests is obscured by familiar humanist, instrumentalist thought; otherwise they would have remained “debris.” Continuing, she writes: When the materiality of the glove, the rat, the pollen, the bottle cap, and the stick started to shimmer and spark, it was in part because of the contingent tableau that they formed with each other, with the street, with the weather that morning, with me. For had the sun not glinted on the black glove, I might not have seen the rat; had the rat not been there, I might not have noted the bottle cap, and so on. But they were all there just as they were, and so I caught a glimpse of an energetic vitality inside each of these things, things that I generally conceived as inert. In this assemblage, objects appeared as things, that is, as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics. (5)

What Bennett calls “things” are really what Husserl refers to as “intentional objects”—objects of the mind. Which is to say, they are less material than mental objects related to, as Husserl puts it, “an intentive mental process [that] has the fundamental characteristic, intentionality, thus the property of being ‘consciousness of something’” (Ideas I 75). A process in other words in which “the subject is ‘directing’ himself to the intentional Object” (75). It is a subjective rendering of debris in the gutter

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(an “objectivating of the thing” (77)) in the name of a giving voice to the independence of objects. Neither, therefore, is the “call” of things in Bennett’s meditation a Heideggerian approach to the being of things. For Heidegger, the focus on these things of sensory perception is the realm of the ontic, whereas the more “foundational” approach is to approach not beings but Being and its relation to temporality. Heidegger “point[s] to temporality as the meaning of the Being of that entity which we call ‘Dasein’” (38); it is “Time [that]must be brought to light—and genuinely conceived—as the horizon for all understanding of Being and for any way of interpreting it” (39). Heidegger’s Being is itself a form of theosophy for which Being is veiled. Bennett’s spiritualizing of matter has its locus more in the subjective rendering of things in the world. On the one hand, then, only in the moment in which social relationships recede do the status of things in their own right emerge as visible (if not intelligible). In the withdrawing of the social and historical the things appear as matter, in excess of human meaning, independent of the human subject. In this second moment when thing power is visible, therefore, things are “active” in that they “command attention,” because they are there “on their own” “in their own right.” It is this that she wants to “give voice” to (as she says in the beginning) even if she doesn’t “understand” it. On the other hand, human meaning and action mediate even those moments in which the things and their thing-power are most ostensibly apparently “visible.” For the intentional object is, beneath its appearance, mediated culturally. She relies, in this regard, on numerous tropes— like “shimmy”—to describe objects’ movement between their double appearances (debris/thing). That which is supposed to resist reduction to semiotic order is conveyed through figurative language. “Tableau,” in fact, is particularly significant here, since it marks not a spontaneous or natural assembly of things, but something artificial, an aesthetic “staging”—in this case, not a landscape or still-life, but a “vibrant”-life in an urban setting. She is both an observer of this “assemblage” and part of the very scene on which she is gazing. Like Barad, she rejects a subject/object binary on which knowledge of the objective world is based (Meeting the Universe Halfway 71–94), and instead makes herself part of the “contingent” tableau, so much that if all things had not been just as they were—in their contingency—they would not have been recognized by her as things with a power of their own. Put differently, this is

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a tableau without an “artist”—or rather, the artist is no longer a Subject standing outside of what is being painted, but a part of it. The objects in the tableau appear self-staging. The forces of interaction are immanent, not transcendent—a view of things that would be denied were one to investigate the “contexts in which (human) subjects set them” (5). These are self-setting things and interactions, seen in their most “materialist” sense. Not only do the broader social relations recede into the background but the subjective dynamic of this intentional object—the thinking Subject—vanishes into an assemblage with objects that are all subjects, co-constructing the tableau. There is, of course, no way to represent the world external to the subject except through human systems of meaning. But Bennett seeks to do precisely that, aware that she “courts” the charge of “performative contradiction” (120) by anthropomorphizing matter in the name of letting it speak on its “own”—a risk she says she is willing to take for the sake of revealing the agency of matter that humans continually overlook in their effort to deny human/nonhuman connections. (“Maybe it is worth running the risks associated with anthropomorphizing (superstition, the divinization of nature, romanticism) because it, oddly enough, works against anthropocentrism: a chord is struck between person and thing, and I am no longer above or outside a nonhuman ‘environment’” (120).) More significant than Bennett’s anthropomorphizing in the name of anti-anthropocentrism is the way the particular form of anthropomorphizing is mediated by economic relations. The overwhelming increase in garbage in just the last few decades is by all accounts staggering. “Global waste generation rates are projected to reach more than 2 billion tons each year by 2025, almost double their level in 2012” (Thorton Matheson, “Disposal Is Not Free: Fiscal Instruments to Internalize the Environmental Costs of Solid Waste” 4). However, in Bennett’s meditation on sidewalk matter, the social relations of the assemblage of debris in the gutter—the political economy of garbage—have to disappear as a condition of openness to “thing-power.” But “debris” or “litter” only exists in class relations and is a sign of the effects of human exploitation—where people are turned into things becomes other-worldly and ineffable. Waste, as Ali Kadri puts it, “is foundational to the rule of capital, and its law of value that governs the rate of value usurpation” (The Accumulation of Waste 2).

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“Thing-power” obscures the ways in which garbage is determined in a double-sense by labor and its relations. Not only are the things that end up in garbage bins, streets, oceans and landfills products of labor that are used to reproduce human lives, but where they end up is entirely shaped by social relations of production—whether in a safe management system as in neighborhoods of wealthier sections of wealthier nations, or in streets, rivers or toxic waste dumps as in poor countries and the poorer regions of rich countries. David Naguib Pellow writes, “those social groups that consume the most natural resources (environmental ‘goods’) and create most of the waste and pollution are the least likely to have to live or work near the facilities that manage those environmental ‘bads’” (Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago 1). Environmental justice movements in Baltimore, the site of Bennett’s debris “tableau,” have in fact struggled for years to address waste management and the relations of race, class and health that shape it: The City of Baltimore’s waste output persistently exceeds the collection and disposal capacities of its Department of Public Words, and recent studies show that basic city services and public amenities are far less consistent in areas of Baltimore with a Black majority of residents (Brown 2016; Dance 2017). In 2019 residents issued complaints about garbage trucks passing through Sandown-Winchester, leaving trash bins unemptied or knocked over (Ortiz 2019). Residents also reported illegal garbage dumping in alleys (Ortiz 2019). Stretches of unkempt streets are among the visible reminders of overlapping regimes of economic disinvestment and political disenfranchisement that have devastated neighborhoods in East and West Baltimore. (Anthony Bayani Rodriguez, “Welcome to Tubman House” 221)

What appears in the grate of a sidewalk is not an “event” without social determinations, but an effect of complex relations within capitalism, the mediation by capital of the everyday. The real “productive” effect of “vibrant matter” is ideological: to obscure these from view. Bennett’s posthumanism places emphasis on the role of “human” instrumentality and “human” marginalizing of objects and the material world. She writes, “the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, lasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers

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circulating around and within human bodies” (ix). “Although all human beings contribute to the waste stream,” however, as Pellow writes, “we rarely share the burden of managing garbage and pollution equally” (Garbage Wars 1). “Human” in posthumanist discourses obscures the social relations that divide humans and above all the mode of production that determines the divisions. The fact that more than 2 billion tons of garbage are produced annually cannot be separated from the relations of profit—“production for the sake of production” (Marx, Capital I 742). The waste of workers and “consumers” is entirely mediated by wage labor-capital relations—relations between those who sell their labor to survive and the owners of capital who exploit the labor of the other. In the same way Husserl’s phenomenology depends on the method of “ephoché,” Bennett’s meditation on debris has to bracket the material relations that produce the phenomenal events to which she assigns a spectral vibrant materiality. But it too—as a mode of (un)seeing—is an effect of changing relations. The contradictions of “waste” have reached a crisis point, requiring new ways of addressing its management. “Neoclassical economic models traditionally assume free disposal of goods, and in the absence of public policies aimed at clearly pricing solid waste, most industries and consumers comport themselves as if this were indeed the case. Of course, free disposal is a myth: Collection and disposal of discarded goods consumes valuable resources, including labor, fuel and land” (Matheson, “Disposal Is Not Free” 4). The concept of the “circular” economy has emerged in recent years to not only monetize waste but to use waste in the exploitation of human labor. Waste, in short, has become a new industry. What was once treated as something “disposed” of for “free” is a new point of production, where the exchange of labor for wages generates surplus value.

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Six

Bennett, I have argued, develops a speculative theory of materiality (“materiality as such”), a theory of matter that does not explain objective relations in the world but is instead a more subjective rendering of matter, matter as intentional object. For such objects to appear in their singular power, social relations have to be suspended. In this inverted image of

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things and people the commodity relations of capital exert their influence. Vibrant matter thus presents the everyday of commodity relations, in which relations between people appear as relations between things, as reflecting not a historical social arrangement which is increasingly irreconcilable with society and nature, but a prior condition of all matter: a transhistorical condition. What makes Bennett’s theory of matter particularly useful in cognitive capitalism, however, is not only that it normalizes the commodified appearances of the everyday but that it fashions a new post-labor notion of agency. Advanced in an ethical discourse foregrounding the interactive activity and interconnectedness of all human and nonhuman things, it cultivates resignation to what is, in a language affirming perpetual activity. What is presented as a theory of matter’s agency, I argue, is a theory of labor from the standpoint of capital. It provides ecological consciousness skills, which is to say that it is a means of training subjects to find in the world in which they are embedded “a natural tendency to the way things are” (Bennett xi). There is of course nothing natural about capitalism, which today structures “the way things are.” In contemporary cognitive capitalism, the subject of labor is a subject continually at work. The perpetually working subject is the outcome both of capital’s intensification of exploitation worldwide and the dissolution of the former compromise of capital and labor through which the working class in the global north had obtained for many workers safer working conditions, higher wages and more secure contracts, as well as the agency of production of the ever-increasing volume of commodities that dominate social life and accumulate in nature. Workers in the US increasingly require two or more jobs to make ends meet and mantras extolling the virtues of continuous activity and a “growth mindset” pervade all aspects of culture and social media. “Growth” is growth of capital, translated into a post-class life lesson. The more capital seeks to increase the rate of profit by increasing productivity, which has been in a long-term decline in the global north, and which heightens class contradictions between labor and capital, the more valuable to capital are those discourses that obscure the source of value and profit in productive labor. The vibrant world of matter that Bennett depicts is a one-sided reflection of these material conditions of work. It is a world of endless activity and interaction. A world, more specifically, of Spinozian substance and what he calls “natura naturans,” which Bennett annotates as “the

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uncaused causality that ceaselessly generates new forms” (116). Everything (human and nonhuman bodies) is “lively” and above all creative, in constant activity and interaction: “In this onto-tale, everything is, in a sense, alive. This liveliness is not capped by an ultimate purpose or grasped and managed through a few simple and timeless (Kantian) categories” but is alive in the sense “natura naturans” (117). And, since it is immanent being, it is without fixed boundaries, teleological ends, outside determinations or hierarchical rankings, which are, to repeat, treated as modes of thinking imposed by humans rather than historical, material relations. Hasana Sharp affirms these immanent dynamics of active matter, writing, “Action within a plane of immanence opposes any notion of activity that depends upon transcendence of one’s situation, impulse, or causal environment” (Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization 216). The historical relations of wage labor that immanently (not “coercively”) force those who are “free” from property to work for property owners to subsist, disappear and generative matter (itself produced by a metaphysical absolute: “causeless cause”) becomes the foundation of human being: “This material vitality is me, it predates me, it exceeds me, it postdates me” (Vibrant Matter 120). Contemporary ungrounded ontologies like Bennett’s naturalize the class relations producing the hyper-active human world—without “naturalizing” them. The material relations that divide labor and capital are dissolved in an ecological imaginary. In this ecological view (which is presented as different from other, older, cruder forms of naturalization of the social), human relations are included in nature—thus it is neither that nature conditions humanity nor (only) that humanity constructs nature, instead nature and humanity are continually interacting with each other and affecting each other. In Latouruan and Harawayan fashion, natureculture hybrids replace binaries of human/nature. Similarly, to distance her philosophy from earlier forms of ecology, Bennett argues that “in contrast to some versions of deep ecology” which posit “a smooth harmony of parts” or “a diversity unified by a common spirit” (xi), in her ontology (following Michel Serres), matter is “a turbulent immanent field” (xi), which is to say that it is “both intimately interconnected and highly conflictual” (23). Conflicts become, in this way, part of the natural fabric of being itself. The agentic force that derives from “nature” as speculative substance is in fact a notion of agency which “distributes” (x) the productive power of labor to all things: matter’s agency is “a positive, productive power

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of [things] own” (1). Vibrant matter, to repeat, doesn’t deny labor but distributes it, as part of its ethical commitment to deny the human subject of labor any more significance than any other “actant” in the world. “Actant” Bennett develops from Latour: “an actant is a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman; it is that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events. It is ‘any entity that modifies another entity in a trial’” (viii). When Bennett writes that her aim is to “describe a more distributive agency” (x), she means that “the efficacy or effectivity to which that term has traditionally referred becomes distributed across an ontologically heterogeneous field, rather than being a capacity localized in a human body or in a collective produced (only) by human efforts” (23). Bennett erases the fact that labor is not just any activity, it is “purposeful” activity that creates use values. Labor, as Marx writes, “as the creator of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence” and as essential to human life in all societies, it “mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself” (Capital I 133). While nature is also a source of value, it is the specific capacity of human labor to create new value, and it has the ability to create new value is labor’s production of surplus value at the point of production that is the basis of profit, of all capital accumulation. Labor in Bennett’s vibrant materialism is rewritten in a double move: the productive labor of humans is first translated (with Latour) into “activity” (“efficacy,” the ability to “do” things and “affect” others) and then distributed to all things. All things, in this way, are “productive.” Which is another way of saying that the agency of producing (exchange) value—which in capitalism is at the point of production through exploited labor—is recast as an inherent, innate capacity of all things. Though it is the case that Bennett seeks to highlight a notion of value that is not tied to monetary value, a value of things in and of themselves, her philosophy is actively developed in opposition to analyzing the conditions that lead to the reduction of all things to economic value. At the core of Bennett’s philosophy of matter’s agentic power, its “productive power” (1), is Spinoza’s concept of conatus in the Ethics and Latour’s theory of actants and their assemblages. “Each thing,” according to Spinoza, strives “as far as it can by its own power” to “persevere in its being” (IIIP6, 498), which he calls the “essence” of all things (IIIP7, 498). Bennett refers to conatus as a “desire to persevere” (120) and

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the “vital impetus” (21) in matter. Following Spinoza, she writes that a body strives to “maintain the specific relation of ‘movement and rest’ that obtains between [a body’s] parts” (22). This “desire” (originating from substance) is made by Bennett “vital” to all, as that which gives all things “impetus.” To (continue to) exist is not to be understood in terms of historical conditions that mediate how things exist and why they perish and are replaced by new things (it is not about the material conditions of existence)—it is instead as an expression of (divine) substance and the interaction of its modes. It is not that bodies’ requiring of certain things to exist is denied, but—as I discuss below—this is secondary to, and determined by, their “vital” striving. I argue that conatus ontologizes the bourgeois narrative of seeking one’s advantage as an essentially mystical impetus of all matter. The role of Left Spinozism, including in the form of Bennett’s new materialism, has been to erase the class relations of conatus while simultaneously championing Spinoza’s recognition that, for instance, “Things which are of assistance to the common Society of men, or which bring it about that men live harmoniously, are useful” and therefore “good” (EIVP40, 470). For Spinoza, it should be emphasized, striving to persist in existence is closely connected to his theory of God as absolute (God as Substance/ Nature), and the resulting rejection of contradiction and negation (and also, consequently, dialectics). In his Demonstration of Proposition 6 in Part III of the Ethics, he spells out the logic of his argument as to why all things persevere. “For singular things are modes by which God’s attributes are expressed in a certain and determinate way”; that is, “things that express, in a certain and determinate way, God’s power, by which God acts. And no thing has anything in itself by which it can be destroyed, or which takes its existence away…On the contrary, it is opposed to everything which can take its existence away […] Therefore, as far as it can, and it lies in itself, it strives to persevere in its being” (498). Because God/ substance is infinite in its existence and power, there is nothing that limits God’s power. As “modes” of divine substance, individuals not only exist but they persevere in existence because there is nothing “within” them that can destroy their own existence (immanently)—that is, only external forces can destroy an individual thing (which is, for instance, why Spinoza denies the possibility of suicide). Leaving aside for the moment that external forces (also) derive from divine substance in Spinoza’s system, to persevere in existence is the expression of God’s existence, which cannot be limited.

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Individuals in other words cannot but persevere, as a logical (and spiritual) outcome of God as self-causing substance. It is a logical conclusion deriving from Spinoza’s own definition of God as one absolute, eternal substance with infinite attributes. Spinoza extends (reason’s) logic in explaining why all things strive and cannot be destroyed except by something external, and in doing so denies the reality of contradiction, and, consequently, dialectics that determine what is (as that which also is negated and superseded). The individual, in Spinoza’s metaphysics, is not in a dialectical relation with the other, and nor can it be said on these terms that social relations of production dialectically mediate humans’ relation with each other and nature, such that, in capitalist relations the human subject of labor, in being separated from the object of labor is also separated from nature (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 275–277). Rather, as Deleuze emphasizes, the individual, as a mode of substance, is an “expression” of substance, and thus its “relation” to others is not one of mediation but expression of the same. In this sense, it makes no sense that the individual could ever be alienated from the substance of which they are a common expression. If humans appear to be in conflict with each other and nature, this is simply the result of a failure to see their “common” “substance.” It is Spinoza’s rejection of contradiction that left readers have used to reject historical materialism’s dialectics. But my main point, here, is that, for Spinoza, divine substance and all of its modifications must persevere in their being. Consequently, this is for Spinoza both that which constitutes the “power” of each individual thing—its ability to persevere in its existence—as well as the “right” of each thing. While he suggests that civil society (democracy) is achieved by members of society giving up their “natural” right to do all they can, investing that power into the sovereign or democratic councils to the advantage of all members of society, his discussion of (a more ideal democratic) society continually returns to conatus as a structuring principle of the social. He does so because society, governed by Reason, is for Spinoza governed according to the laws of nature (which translates the rules of the market and market life into natural laws and natural life). Thus in his Theological-Political Treatise he writes: “Now the supreme law of nature is that each thing strives to persevere in its state, as far as it can by its own power, and does this, not on account of anything else, but only of itself” (xvi, 3, 282– 283) and “From this it follows that each individual has the supreme right

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to do this, i.e., (as I have said), to exist and have effects as it is naturally determined to do” (xvi, 3, 283). In fact, Spinoza associates freedom precisely with the striving by which he seeks his individual advantage: “A free man,[…] acts, lives, and preserves his being from the foundation of seeking his own advantage” (EIVP67, 584). This, of course, is a central doctrine of Adam Smith’s political economy: “Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society, which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society” (The Wealth of Nations 291–292). Jonathan Israel, in Spinoza, Life and Legacy, thus rightly refers to Spinoza’s argument that “when each man most seeks his own advantage for himself, that men are most useful to each other” (qtd. in Israel 17) as “the essence of trade” (17). Such arguments by Spinoza regarding self-advantage make the political economy of “striving” clear, in that they posit “singular things” as persisting and striving exclusively by their own innate power. This is—despite the vigorous efforts of the Left Spinozists to deny it—the bourgeois theory of the capitalist self, who produces the world without labor. It is an inversion of material relations. In the same way that substance is posited as self-causing, the modifications of substance (“singular things”) are also self-determining, by virtue of their own, innate power, their striving. Spinoza, it needs to be emphasized, does not deny that bodies are subject to external forces (in causal chains that are both derived from substance but also modally different) and emphasizes the importance of community in enhancing the power of each individual (a notion echoed in other bourgeois Enlightenment thinkers and even Smith). Bennett appeals to this argument in the Ethics , writing, “Spinoza believes, for example, that the more kinds of bodies with which a body can affiliate, the better: ‘As the body is more capable of being affected in many ways and of affecting external bodies … so the mind is more capable of thinking’” (22–23). But things are firstly “singular things” whose power is equated with their (individual) ability to persist. It is thus that Spinoza also argues that a “lack” of power comes from an individual’s willingness to be controlled by others: “true virtue,” he writes, “is nothing but living according to the guidance of reason, and so lack of power consists only in this, that a man allows himself to be guided by things outside him, and to be determined by them to do what the common constitution of external

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things demands, not what his own nature, considered in itself, demands” (EIVP37S1, 566). Lack of the ability to meet one’s needs is translated into individual lack. “Affect” emerges in Spinoza as a way to explain why individuals, in whose best interest it is to follow Reason, do not. He was, as Negri emphasizes, deeply concerned to explain why the “multitude” would resort to violence in support of injustice (as they did when they murdered Jan de Witt, a leader in the Dutch Republic with whom Spinoza associated, and his brother, Cornelis de Witt, in 1672). It is, Spinoza concluded, because humans are guided more by (sad) passions than by reason that people believe the superstitions of religious and political authorities and see each other as enemies. In his Political Treatise, Spinoza remarks that “If men were bound by the established practice of nature to be guided by reason, everyone would necessarily be guided by reason” (ii, 18, 515). “But,” he continues, “men are mostly guided by appetite without reason. They don’t disturb the order of nature; they necessarily follow it. So the ignorant and weak-minded are no more bound by the Law of nature to organize their lives wisely than a sick man is bound to have a sound Body” (ii, 18, 515). Humans, for Spinoza, are determined by nature, in their capacity to reason, to desire, to be affected—the ignorant no less than the reasoning are products of nature—but humans more often act not according to reason but to passions. What Spinoza calls “affect” is an expression of class conflict, translated into philosophical discourse as a conflict between reason and affect (which ultimately run along “parallel” lines), naturalizing the conflicts that produce affective responses. To draw on Spinoza’s naturalism today to explain the agency of things and people is a regressive and indeed reactionary understanding of the world. Its regressiveness is therefore downplayed by left thinkers and instead is revised as an exciting, ethical championing of the common and even the communal in Spinoza. Left readings of conatus obscure this essentially self-centering approach to the world by remaking it essentially social. Bennett, for instance, argues that “Conative substance turns itself into confederate bodies, that is, complex bodies that in turn congregate with each other in the pursuit of the enhancement of their power” (23). She, in other words, invokes Spinoza’s “idea of conative bodies that strive to enhance their power of activity by forming alliances with other bodies” (xi). And, following Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinozian affect, Bennett

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makes all bodies affective in their striving, which is to say that they not only affect other bodies, but they “suffer” the actions of other affective bodies (22). On this basis, Bennett argues, conative bodies are “social bodies”: “Spinoza’s conative bodies are also associative or (one could even say) social bodies, in the sense that each is, by its very nature as a body, continuously affecting and being affected by other bodies” (21). Bennett draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of the body and affect in Spinoza to make her point: “‘We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are’” (cited xii). Agency is not based on an Ideal or even a will here; it is simply what a body can do, in different interactions with other bodies. In this postnormative account of the body’s power, “No one knows” what a body’s affects are in advance, since its agency emerges differently in different contexts (assemblages), which are in principle infinite. Bennett, drawing out the logic further, treats this also as an agency that is neither individual nor human-centered but “impersonal”: that is, “an affect intrinsic to forms that cannot be imagined (even ideally) as persons” (xii). Impersonal agency then is agency through which any human/nonhuman thing interacts in the world with other things. Spinozian affect is interpreted in a posthumanist sense as a posthumanist theory of the (non/human) body. In a similar sense, “action,” as Sharp writes, “becomes an endeavor to cultivate a sensuous receptivity, in order to better determine the relations of the composition that most enable one to think and thrive. Since one can exist only by virtue of the affects that circulate in one’s environment, … ethics entails the development of mutually beneficial affective compositions” (Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization 216). The key point here is that through such theories, all bodies are understood as always already “social”—“before” any historical relations associated with humans emerge. The “social” relations that pre-exist humanity therefore come to determine human social relations. The ideological implication is that it is not necessary to change capitalist social relations—which are in essence relations premised on privatization, on the separation of the vast majority from the means of subsistence so that all wealth can be appropriated by the few. Because matter, including the matter of and that constitutes humans, is already social, the real concern of Bennett’s book is to “cultivate” modes of “looking” at and “sensing” the vibrancy of matter, and making more evident the role of nonhuman agents in human political life. It is neither possible nor desirable to bring about social transformation. Vibrant Matter’s “newfound attentiveness

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to matter and its powers,” as Bennett makes explicit, “will not solve the problem of human exploitation or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations” (13). Left readings of conatus are uncritical readings. They accept the presupposition that all things are “singular things” even as they champion Spinoza as post-individualist and even “transindividual”-ist (as in the writings of Éienne Balibar), and undermine any effort to situate Spinoza in the class relations of his time and their own. In their desire to found a post-class notion of agency, what is displaced by Left interpretations is that conatus becomes possible in the way it is theorized in the context of a developing capitalist society. Spinoza in this regard was not alone—but he gives conatus a particularly important accent. Other early modern philosophers used the concept of striving/conatus in theorizing existence, and as Edwin Curley notes, “Hobbes thinks the striving for self-preservation is necessary (and hence, not reprehensible)” (Political Treatise 508n6). In other words, like Spinoza, Hobbes does not treat this in “moral ” terms. The reason why both Hobbes and Spinoza have to re-situate striving (as “not reprehensible”) is because religious discourse had made this a moral issue. But this becomes a (moral) “problem” in a historical sense, not simply a philosophical or religions one. “Striving” is a theory of an emerging class. The concept becomes necessary in a world in which wealth is increasing, and in which not just the aristocracy but the “middle” classes are growing wealthy. In a society fraught with class conflicts between the land-owning aristocracy and the emerging bourgeoisie (whose wealth depends on the “self-expansion” of capital) striving has to be de-moralized, to legitimate the interests of the rising bourgeois class. But in Spinoza’s writing, as Curley also notes, conatus also takes on a slight difference relative to Hobbes. “In Spinoza [striving] is generalized to anything we do in consequence of the laws of nature, i.e., anything we do” (Political Treatise 508n6; my emphasis). In Hobbes, in other words, striving is limited. Spinoza expands the concept—infinitely. All things strive to do all they can; all things seek their advantage, and all seeking of advantage is an outcome not an abberation of “nature”/God. They do so determined as self-determining singular things. Capital, as “self-expanding” value, takes on a philosophical-ethical hue in Spinoza.

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Latour, in fact, draws out the economic logic implicit in the concept conatus in his effort to update the concept. In his Spinoza Lectures (What is the Style of Matters of Concern?), Latour discusses the significance of sociologist Gabriel Tarde, who influenced Deleuze, in his retheorization of conatus. The problem with Spinozian and other classical theories of conatus , for Tarde, is that its grounding in substance is too closely connected to “subsistence.” In other words, to persist is merely to subsist, which limits being to what is, i.e., to the same, Tarde and Latour argue. Instead of “persistence of being through substance,” conatus thus ought to be revised as “persistence through difference” (16). Latour writes: “‘Exister c’est différer’, such is Tarde’s redefinition of conatus ” (16). Substance has to be replaced by difference, because, as Latour puts it, “you have to persist by having new properties” (16). For Latour, it is therefore necessary, following Tarde, to “replac[e] ‘being’ by ‘having.’” To be is to have, which is to say, to have more. While Latour calls the usurpation of being by having in the case of Tarde “an amazing feat of sociological metaphysics” (17), Tarde (and Latour) in fact draw out what is already implicit in Spinoza’s conatus and which, as I discussed, actually distinguishes his theory from Hobbes’s. In Spinoza, in contrast to Hobbes, to persist in existence is “anything” (Curley) one does to seek one’s “advantage.” But to gain advantage is not to persist in the same state, but to extend and expand one’s position. And, for Spinoza, the more one expands one’s connections, etc., the more one lives, the more one is cause of oneself. Tarde, in other words, makes explicit the logic of accumulation in Spinoza’s philosophy of conatus. Spinoza, after all, equates striving with “desire”: “Desire,” he writes, “is nothing but the striving to act itself” (EIVP59D, 580). Latour of course uses Tarde to emphasize the “networks” within which one exists—to exist is to have networks that enable one to exist as difference. To differ from oneself is to change. But, tellingly, change becomes in Latour “having”—having difference. This fluid sense of the self, a never a “pure” or self-same self, but a self-differing self, is the new subject of an increasingly global capitalism. Difference, in other words, is another name for excess, for surplus, beyond subsistence-as-similarity. The more overt replacing of being with having—unthinkable except perhaps as parody in the ontologies of Nietzsche and Heidegger—reflects the dominance of capitalist relations in the postwar period. The metaphysics of “having”—and having in the sense of accumulation—is a translation of the ethos of the entrepreneur in neoliberal capital. It reflects

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the complete subsumption of the world to wage labor-capital relations, on the basis of which being itself appears ontologically tied to (private) property. Despite the efforts of Latour, Bennett and other contemporary theorists of ontology to insist on the autonomy of their ideas from economic relations, economic relations haunt even their most autonomous-seeming sentiments, as when gazing at a gutter, and determine what counts as “outdated” and “new.” It is necessary to replace the static, identitarian subject with a new, ecological subject of difference for the same reason that economist A. Kling writes, “Where the tradition is to speak of the ‘representative agent,’ the trend will increasingly be toward ‘I contain multitudes’” (“How Effective is Economic Theory?”). Kling suggests that older economic theory is now “stale and unreliable”. But the older models of subjectivity (as singular) are “unreliable” (in economics and philosophy) because their essentialism (a representative of “one” identity) limits productivity; they do not account for the rapid changes that are now commonplace in the workplace and that require infinitely malleable workers who continually adapt themselves in new assemblages to meet the ever more reckless demands of capital. The “ecological” subject of conatus-as-having grounds capital’s imperatives in the ungrounded nature of existence itself.

References Aristotle. Metaphysics. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Vol. 2. Revised Oxford Translation. Bollingen Series LXXI, edited by Jonathan Barnes, Princeton University Press, 1984, pp. 1552–1728. Balibar, Étienne. Spinoza: From Individuality to Transindividuality. Delft: Eburon, 1997. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007. ———. “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Constructivism Without Contradiction.” Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science, edited by L. H. Nelson and J. Nelson. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996, pp. 161–194. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010. Bensusan, Hilan. Being Up for Grabs: On Speculative Anarcheology. Open Humanities Press, 2016.

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Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations, Volume 108, Issue 1 (2009), pp. 1–21. Braidotti, Rosi. “Transversal Posthumanities.” Philosophy Today, Volume 63, Issue 4 (Fall 2019), pp. 1181–1195. Brassier, Ray. “Deleveling: Against ‘Flat Ontologies’.” Under Influence—Philosophical Festival Drift, edited by Channa van Dijk, Eva van der Graaf, Michiel den Haan, Rosa de Jong, Christiaan Roodenburg, Dyane Til and Deva Waal. Omnia, 2015, pp. 64–80. Calarco, Matthew. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. Columbia University Press, 2008. Callinicos, Alex. The New Age of Catastrophe. Polity, 2023. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press, 2010. Cotter, Jennifer, et al. “Introduction: Posthumanism and the Evacuation of Critique.” Human, All Too (Post)Human: The Humanities After Humanism. Lexington Press, 2016, pp. 1–12. DeLanda, Manuel, and Graham Harman. The Rise of Realism. Polity, 2017. Deleuze, Gilles. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Zone Books, 1992. ———. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. City Lights Books, 1988. Della Rocca, Michael. Spinoza. Routledge, 2008. Descartes, René. Discourse. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Vol. I, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 109–151. ———. Meditations. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Vol. II, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 1–62. ———. Principles of Philosophy. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Vol. I, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 177–291. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Escobar, Arturo. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press, 2018. Ferguson, Stephen C. “What’s Epistemology Got to Do with It?”. Philosophy of African American Studies. Palgrave, 2015, pp. 159–192. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 . Edited by Colin Gordon, Harvester Press, 1980. Harman, Graham. Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory. Polity, 2016. ———. Quadruple Object. Zero Books, 2011. ———. “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today (Spring 2007), pp. 104–117.

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Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper and Row, 1962. ———. Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event). Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu, Indiana University Press, 2012. ———. Nietzsche. Vol. 1, translated and edited by David Farrell Krell, Harper and Row, 1991. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Book I, translated by F. Kersten, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983. Israel, Jonathan. Spinoza, Life and Legacy. Oxford University Press, 2023. Kadri, Ali. The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction. Brill, 2023. Kling, Arnold. “How Effective Is Economic Theory?” National Affairs, Summer 2017 (accessed 7/12/24). Latour, Bruno. “A Perilous Change of Correspondence.” An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, translated by Catherine Porter, Harvard University Press, 2013, pp. 69–96. ———. Pasteurization of France. Translated by Alan Sheridan and John Law, Harvard University Press, 1988. ———. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford, 2007. ———. What Is the Style of Matters of Concern? Spinoza Lectures. Royal Van Gorcum, 2008. Letter to Overbeck July 30, 1881. The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann, Penguin Books, 1988, p. 9. Lukács, Georg. Ontology of Social Being. Vol II, translated by David Fernbach, Merlin Press, 1978. Luxemburg, Rosa. “Speeches and Letters on War and Revolution, 1918–19.” The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, Monthly Review Press, 2004, pp. 342–372. ———. “The Janius Pamphlet: The Crisis in German Social Democracy.” The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, edited by Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson, Monthly Review Press, 2004, pp. 312–341. Matheron, Alexandre. Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza. Edited by David Maruzzella, translated by Gil Morejon, Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Matheson, Thorton. “Disposal Is Not Free: Fiscal Instruments to Internalize the Environmental Costs of Solid Waste.” IMF Working Paper (WP/12/283), 2019. Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. I, translated by B. Fowkes, Penguin, 1976. ———. Capital. Vol. III. Marx-Engels Collected Works. Vol. 37. Progress Publishers, 1983.

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———. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Marx-Engels Collected Works. Vol. 3. Progress Publisher, 1975, pp. 229–346. ———. Introduction. Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3. Progress Publishers, 1975, pp. 175–187. ———. Introduction to Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus, Penguin, 1993, pp. 81–11. ———. Preface. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Marx-Engels Collected Works. Vol. 29. International Publishers, 1987, pp. 261–265. ———. “Theses on Feuerbach.” Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5. International Publishers, 1976, pp. 6–8. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology. Collected Works. Vol. 5. International Publishers, 1976, pp. 19–539. ———. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Marx-Engels Collected Works. Vol. 6. International Publishers, 1976, pp. 477–519. Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by Ray Brassier, Continuum, 2008. Montag, Warren. Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries. Verso, 1999. ———. Preface. The New Spinoza. Edited by Warren Montag and Ted Stolze, University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Nietzsche, Frederick. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Edited by Rolf-Peter Horstmann and translated by Judith Norman, Cambridge UP, 2002. ———. “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann, Penguin, 1988, pp. 42–47. ———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann, Penguin, 1988, pp. 103–439. ———.Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann, edited by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, London: Lowe & Brydone, 1968. Pellow, David Naguib. Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago. MIT, 2002. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage, Yale University Press, 1970. Rodriguez, Anthony Bayani. “Welcome to Tubman House.” Global ImPossibilities: Exploring the Paradoxes of Just Sustainabilities, edited by Phoebe Godfrey and Mary Buchanan, Zed Books, 2021, pp. 221–234. Safronov, Dmitri G. Nietzsche’s Political Economy. Walter de Gruyter Press, 2023. Sharp, Hasana. Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization. University of Chicago Press, 2011. Smith, Murray E.G., Jonah Butovsky, and Josh Watterton. Twilight Capitalism: Karl Marx and the Decay of the Profit System. Fernwood Publishing, 2021.

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CHAPTER 4

The New (New) Materialism: Materialism with a Green Aroma

4.1

One

In The Politics of Spinoza’s Renaturalization, Hasana Sharp argues that “A Spinozist can agree with the notion that man is a historical being, while insisting that history is not the product of overcoming nature” (8). This is because, History is not a progressive spiritualization of nature, where humans, through working together, come to master, bring under control, and “interiorize” biological need, instinct, and other “external” elements of our existence. Nature, for Spinoza, names the necessity of ongoing mutation and the inescapability of dependence among finite beings. Rather than serving to prescribe the entelecheic unfolding of a thing’s essence, Spinoza’s nature affirms the variability intrinsic to relational existence. To be a relational being is to undergo a history of constitutive affections and transformations in response to encounters with other beings, human and nonhuman. (8)

History, of course, is not a process of “progressive spiritualization of nature.” However, what Sharp calls “the variability intrinsic to relational existence” is, in the name of a non-anthropocentric, posthumanist treatment of nature, a de-historicization and de-materialization of the social and with it the relation of humans and nature. History, here, unfolds in a “mutational” logic. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature America, Inc. 2025 K. DeFazio, Spinoza, New Materialism and the Contemporary, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50232-2_4

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In the place of “spiritualizing” nature, what Sharp offers as a (new) “naturalism” is a mutational theory of change premised on the “refus[al] to distinguish between natural and social forces, or mental and physical determination” that is central to Spinoza’s metaphysics (9). Far from representing an advance in social theory, it marks a regression. It collapses both the human and natural as well as the material and the immaterial into a (post)humanist notion of “relational being” in which historical, material relations are suspended. Consequently, it ignores that the “history of the development of society proves to be essentially different from that of nature,” as Engels writes in Ludwig Feuerbach (365). In “the history of society,” “the actors are all endowed with consciousness”; that is (though their actions often have unintended consequences), they are “acting with deliberation or passion, working towards definite goals; nothing happens without a conscious purpose” within definite social relations, the “driving forces” of which it is the task of social analysis and critique to discover (Ludwig Feuerbach 365–366). These driving forces are the contradictions between the forces and relations of production that make possible the “overcoming” not of “nature” but private property relations, and with them the subjection of nature to the rule of profit. In Sharp’s hybrid realm, however, the mediation of human/ nature relations by exchange relations are dissembled along with the relation of economic base and cultural superstructure. In this collapsed zone, the everyday is the space of human-nature, material-immaterial, cultural-biological hybrids which (it is assumed) cannot be located in their connection to the unfolding contradictions of capitalism without erasing the significance of nature. “Relational” here, to be more explicit, is not materialist—which is to say it does not grasp the connections between humans themselves and between humans and nature in terms of the social totality of capitalism as a mode of production. Relational being is the matterist being of networks and interactions of entities within them, a Latourian sense of “relational” being that is perhaps more aptly termed “concatenational”: “What does this interdependence mean in practice? Simply that the world is ‘concatenated’: linked together,” as Klaus Schwab, founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum, and Thierry Malleret, managing partner of a predictive analysis consulting firm, put it in The Great Reset (19)—“an important conceptual effect” of which is that the concatenated world now

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“invalidates ‘silo thinking’” (22). A concantenated world is “a web of complex interactions” in which all decisions and related risks “affect each other” (19) but which lacks any deeper determining structure of relations. Concatenational being is being immersed in the volatile, conflict-ridden and precarious effects of capitalist relations, a notion of being depicted by (Spinozist) thinkers and bourgeois economists alike as an argument for a more than human economy, a more ethical capitalism. History, in other words, is dialectical not mutational. It is the dialectical outcome of struggles over social resources, resources through which human labor and its transforming of nature, within specific property relations, meet human needs. Mutational notions of change—which, in Spinoza-influenced posthumanist theory treat change as adaptation (what Sharp above calls changes in “response to encounters with other beings”)—restrict change to change within local environments. But local environments, far from being autonomous from the social relations of production, are always mediated by them, and never more has this been the case than in contemporary capitalism. Mutation, to put this another way, by substituting local changes within local networks, displaces revolution (as in the “the most radical rupture with traditional property relations” (Manifesto of the Communist Party 504)). The irony is that mutational discourses ostensibly intended to challenge human domination of nature actually consign nature to “mastery” (Sharp 8) by human beings in perpetuity. So long as the private property relations within which nature is primarily used in the service of appropriating human surplus value are made to appear invisible or inevitable, humans cannot play a conscious role in transforming the capitalist social relations of production that by alienating humans from their labor and each other also alienate them from nature. In this chapter I argue against such mutational interpretations of history and Spinoza’s “nature” and address the implications for “materialism.” Through an anatomy of the new materialist assumptions as they are articulated in one of the most influential statements of the new materialism, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s collection New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, I argue for a counter-theory of materialism and materialist relations that brings back the dialectical role of labor in mediating the relation between humans and nature.

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4.2

Two

In the broadest terms, materialism, as Engels puts it, “insist[s] on explaining the world from the world itself” (Dialectics of Nature 7). It is, to put it differently, the unyielding opponent of the otherworldly— of those projects that derive the material world from another world of spirit or that see in the natural world a supernatural force or design. In its most revolutionary tendency in the modern era, materialism is determination by the mode of production. This historical materialism is the antagonist of existing class arrangements because, by revealing the transformative agency of human labor in making history and producing the material world—the social totality—it also reveals the dialectical nature of existing social relations of private property, which inevitably come into conflict with the revolutionary advance of the forces of production. The more the powers of collective labor become effectively organized and efficient at producing the means to meet the material and cultural needs of humanity as a whole, the more intolerable becomes the restrictions placed on this process by the needs of a few to personally profit from it at the expense of the vast majority whose labor produces the wealth. Materialism is therefore a weapon in the historic struggle against private property because it allows people to take part as conscious participants in transforming relations of private ownership, the root of social inequalities. It is for this reason that ontology—the account of the objective constitution of reality, both natural and social—has been central to the project of materialism, for it provides positive knowledge of the objective world as a totality. Since capitalism’s victory in the early modern era over the feudal order (against which the bourgeoisie deployed materialism to challenge the spiritualizations that justified aristocratic rule), bourgeois theorists have waged a protracted war against materialism and ontology in their efforts to naturalize their own class interests and obscure the source of profit in surplus value, which is what maintains class inequality despite bourgeois democracy (equal rights). In place of materialism and the positive knowledge of the world, they have substituted various species of spiritualism that invert the relation of the material and the immaterial, establishing the otherworldly as the basis of reality and, in effect, placing it beyond the reach of human knowledge and transformation. The attack against materialism, in other words, is where the war against socialism—the new world governed by the principle, “From each according to his abilities,

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to each according to his needs!” (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme 87)—is fought at the level of philosophy. But today, as the class struggle intensifies under the global contradictions of capital, the fight against materialism, as I have suggested throughout Spinoza, New Materialism and the Contemporary, increasingly takes place within the very terms of “materialism.” The avid intensity with which materialism is today being appropriated and turned on its head is especially evident in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s collection New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, which has become a new manifesto for cultural theory. I examine the New Materialisms collection at some length in this chapter because it extends the arguments of Jane Bennett and the Left Spinozists. Claiming that “the radicalism of the dominant discourses which have flourished under the cultural turn is now more or less exhausted,” Coole and Frost insist that the time has come for the return to materialism and the world of matter (3), made possible they suggest by diverse developments in digital technology, the natural sciences, biotechnology, the environment, the economy, health and climate, for instance. The “new materialism” energetically deploys such concepts as matter, materiality, objectivity, empirical reality and ontology; denounces theological explanations of the world; and declares that it is no longer possible to ignore the way in which, as Coole and Frost put it, humans are “embedded in a material world” (34). Yet, what is termed materialism in the “new materialism” is largely a physicalist notion of matter (an experientialism which it justifies by allying itself with the discourses of natural science and phenomenology) and which is ideologically valuable precisely because it is “a materialism which excludes the historical process” (Marx Capital I 494). As in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century views of the material as a passive and inert substance that “resists” conceptuality, this is a materialism that does not explain the material world as a dialectical process whose motion may be positively and reliably understood. At the same time, the new post-historical materialism is elaborated through a posthumanist ontological framework that seems to offer an understanding of the social as a totality, emphasizing interlocking “webs” of connections between the social and natural world, and the “vital,” corporeal “embeddedness” of the human in the nonhuman. That is to say, it offers a notion of “collective life as a complex relational field that emerges in an intercorporeal, intersubjective ‘between’” (Dianna Coole 113), in which “phenomena are caught in a multitude of interlocking

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systems and forces” (Coole and Frost 9). Such allusions to totality of course have great appeal at a time when the global interconnections of social and natural life can no longer be avoided and when people struggle to understand the conditions to which their lives are ruthlessly subjected. Yet new materialist answers have more to do with enchantment than materialist explanation of the world. “The huge success of these theories” that call for the “re-enchantment of the world along with the repudiation of the modern,” Benjamin Boysen and Jesper Lundsfryd Rasmussen argue, “bespeaks a strong quasi- religious and premodern yearning in our culture today” (“The Material Turn and the Fantasy to Undo Modernity” 11–12). What is being offered by posthumanist ontology, as by Sharpe’s Spinozian naturalism, is in fact a theory blocking class understanding of issues in their material totality. It is a theory of “ecology” that empties the social out of the world, reducing it to physical and biological dynamics of local systems. Like Sharp, who in The Politics of Spinoza’s Renaturalization contends that “Spinoza’s naturalism provides the resources” for a new “posthumanist” orientation (4–5), Coole and Frost find in Spinoza a new posthumanist ethos. They write that “[t]he prevailing ethos of new materialist ontology” involves “creating new concepts and images of nature that affirm matter’s immanent vitality” and thus it “draws inspiration” from Spinoza’s ontology (8). The value of Spinoza’s “nature” and its immanent posthumanist agency is made more explicit by Sharp: “in light of posthumanist critiques of human exceptionalism” (18), Sharp foregrounds that “Existence for Spinoza is horizontal. The infinite creative force of nature is not separable from the infinitely many beings that exist. Humanity receives no special metaphysical value and no privileged place in nature” (1). Critical to Spinoza’s decentering of the human is his theorization of natura naturans and natura naturata, which establishes a post-binary approach to the relation of humans and nature that has influenced the Left Spinozists as well as the (“new”) new materialists in the contemporary. “[B]y Natura naturans we must understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself,” Spinoza writes, “or such attributes of substance as express an eternal and infinite essence”; or in other words “God, insofar as he is considered a free cause” (EIP29Schol, 434). “But by Natura naturata I understand whatever follows from the necessity of God’s nature, or from any of Gods’ attributes, i.e., all the modes of God’s attributes insofar as they are considered as things which are

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in God, and can neither be nor be conceived without God” (EIP29S, 434). Nature as God is a free cause; Nature as God’s effects, are modifications of substance. The distinction is often annotated as the creating and the created, but Sharp draws out the (ideo)logic when writing that that modes or modal determinations are identified by Spinoza “as natura naturata, an effect of nature, rather than natura naturans, a primordial causal expression of nature” (Renaturalization 69). Substance as God or Nature is “primordial” nature, and all being is an expression of this “infinite creative force of nature” (1). Such interpretations of naturalism as a basis to understand all human and nonhuman life as modifications of a primordial force are authorized by such Left Spinozist interpretations as Deleuze’s, which treats Spinoza’s distinction as especially central to Spinoza’s expressionism and its reconfiguration of God: “For God’s nature is, as natura naturans, in itself expressive. This expression is so natural, or essential, to God, that it does not merely reflect a readymade God, but forms a kind of unfolding of divinity, a logical and genetic constitution of divine substance […] God expresses himself in himself, in his own nature, in the attributes that constitute him. He has no ‘need’ to produce, lacking nothing” (Expressionism 99). Humans become, on these terms, embedded in a borderless world encompassing all (of God’s) creative expression. Embeddedness and corporeality are ideological terms: their role is to limit knowledge to local knowledge and especially to the knowledge of experience. They are code words for anti-totality. It is not surprising, then, that the affirmation of individual experience and rejection of objectivity leads the new materialists to embrace spiritualism, the framework of which is rooted in individual beliefs and feelings. For all its criticisms of religion and metaphysics, in the end “objective existence” according to proponents of new materialism is “only possible because of a certain spectrality” (Cheah 77). In fact, Coole and Frost joyfully affirm the new materialism because its “postdualism” means that there can be “no definitive break between... material and spiritual phenomena” (10). Posthumanist ontology, in other words, turns out to be a very familiar spectral ontology—an idealism. Under the guise of a militant anti-theological return to the material world (which is needed to distinguish new materialism from the right’s crude defense of theocracy), the new materialists advocate a subtle “new” reading of the (spiritual) “life” of matter. It returns to “materialist traditions developed prior to modernity” (Coole and Frost 4) to avoid the worldly determination of

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reality and instead find “fresh applications” (4) of spiritualism. The new materialism, consequently, is not a rejection but an updating of the culturalism that has played an integral role in dismantling the materialist critique of capitalism in the postwar era. In analyzing some of the central assumptions of “the new materialism” and its historical context, I take as my focus Coole and Frost’s anthology, paying particular attention to the way posthumanist “ontology” and “matter” are theorized by Diana Coole, Pheng Cheah, Samantha Frost. Their theorizations of matter and the relation between subject and object, I argue, reflect a rewriting of some of the “fundamental questions” of materialism that is inherited from Bennett in a more immediate sense and the earlier Left Spinozists in a more distant manner. This revision of materialism has profoundly problematic implications for materialism and the struggle for a world organized on the basis of meeting social needs. Although the book’s contributors “pluralize” materialisms (4), the resulting eclectic bringing together of many (contradictory) arguments and traditions nevertheless articulates a new (ideo)logic for the era of global austerity.

4.3

Three

It will perhaps be helpful to first review the ways new materialists distinguish themselves from existing theoretical traditions. On the one hand, as I mentioned, proponents of the new materialism express frustration with what Coole and Frost refer to as the “allergy to ‘the real’” of earlier textual approaches that has had the effect of discouraging “critical inquirers from the more empirical investigation that material processes and structures require” (6). Taking their cue, therefore, not from the languages of textuality but (following such theorists as Deleuze and Guattari, Bruno Latour and N. Katherine Hayles) from the discourses of the “new” biology (i.e., biogenetics) and the new physics (chaos and systems theories) and often hybridizing them with the (old) phenomenology and vitalism, the new materialists highlight the dynamics of matter at the cellular, molecular, subatomic and cosmic levels and the way they subtend social relations and constitute the human body. Indeed, they suggest that social relations are best understood on the basis of these physical/ biological levels of “matter.” “Our existence,” Coole and Frost observe,

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depends from one moment to the next on myriad micro-organisms and diverse higher species, on our own hazily understood bodily and cellular reactions and on pitiless cosmic motions, on the material artifacts and natural stuff that populate our environment, as well as on socioeconomic structures that produces and reproduce the conditions of our everyday lives. (1)

They thus ask with great urgency, “How could we ignore the power of matter and the ways it materializes in our ordinary experiences or fail to acknowledge the primacy of matter in our theories?” (1). For new materialists, the problem with the “cultural turn” is in part the “constructivist orientation” (4) of its theory, which treats matter as a social construction with no existence or agency independent of humans. I leave aside for now that this reading of “culturalism” is itself a culturalist reading of the cultural turn that obscures its material basis and allows new materialism to construct itself as different; in actuality the basis of culturalism is the treatment of ideas and practices as isolated from the material relations of history—an ideological approach that has been and remains the cultural common sense in global capitalism because it deflects attention from the roots of culture in relations of exploitation. “Constructivist” accounts of matter, new materialist critics argue, are no longer capable of addressing new realities like global climate change, ecological crisis and growing economic disparities worldwide, not to mention the way new technologies and new scientific discoveries have meant that “unprecedented things are currently being done with and to matter, nature, life, production, and reproduction” through, for instance, biogenetics (4). They suggest that it is now necessary to address the ways in which the material world—the world not just of objects, nature and the human body, but such phenomena as “the electricity grid, food, and trash” (9)—has an “agency” which has hitherto not been accounted for. On the other hand, the new materialists “share a common foe in mechanistic or deterministic materialism,” as Bennett puts it in her essay in Coole and Frost’s collection (“A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism” 48). That is, the “new” materialism differs from classical theories of materialism, since the latter, following Newton, treated nature and matter as set in motion by a divine (external) source. In these mechanical theories of nature, matter’s movement does not originate from within but from without and with a clocklike precision that can be observed and measured. Moreover, the Cartesian distinction between

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subject/object informing mechanical materialisms posits an active human subject capable of knowing/mastering a passive, natural world—a distinction that is increasingly viewed as unethical not to mention regularly subverted by new realities, such as growing frequencies of natural disasters which appear to exceed our ability to understand them. It is on this basis that the new materialists also oppose historical materialism. Historical materialism, the new materialists claim, is equally mechanical since it treats the agency of matter as an effect of its relation to the human subject of labor, and is “deterministic” because it assumes causal relations in the world exist and can be understood—an approach new materialists suggest does not account for matter’s autonomous contingency and is incapable of addressing today’s increasingly “unpredictable” realities which defy “totality.” This is the case not only in the new materialist refurbishments of Derridean textualism, namely Cheah’s rejection of the dialectical materialist theory of totality as a “metaphysics of presence” (72) on the basis of which he reads Marxism as “an organismic vitalism” (87); it is also true among the new materialists claiming to defend historical materialism, as is made clear in Jason Edward’s suggestion that we can use the Marxist notion of totality provided we re-understand it (after Althusser and Derrida) as “a totality without a center” (286). Which is to say, as an open field of networks in which class is undecidable and indeterminate. This is another way of saying that totality is only advocated by new materialists to the extent that it is turned into a concept without any explanatory power. Consequently, while they return to matters of political economy, the new materialists treat historical materialism’s approach to the relation of culture and economics as “dogmatic” and opt instead for an understanding of “the material details of everyday life and broader geopolitical and socioeconomic structures” as a “complex, pluralistic, and relatively open process” (Coole and Frost 7). Whether they are defending the “immanent generativity” of matter in terms of the new biology (Bennett, Coole and Frost), phenomenology (Frost), deconstructive-Deleuzianism (Cheah) or Nietschean will/drives (Orlie), the writers in New Materialisms position themselves in the materialist tradition by more or less explicitly appealing to the discourses of the natural sciences—especially the “new” physics and biology—and treating matter’s vitality as having an existence and agency independent of the consciousness of the subject or any divine cause, thus rejecting those “mysticisms derived from animism, religion, or romanticism” (Coole, “The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh” 92). They oppose

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themselves to the more overt religious imaginaries in which “the cosmos [i]s a rank-ordered creation, at the top of which the Designer has placed his most vital creature, man” (Bennett, “A Vitalist Stopover” 60), while they reject “deterministic” (or what they also call “economistic”) materialism. The new materialists, therefore, are aligned not with the Marxist tradition of materialism, but the early modern materialists like Spinoza, and also vitalists like Bergson and phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, not to mention revealing a strong affinity for Nietzsche— whose critique of rationality and science undergirds the entire “new materialist” framework. To what extent, then, is this new defense of materialism and matter a ruthless criticism of the earlier cultural theory it claims to move beyond? To what extent does the new materialism represent a return “to the most fundamental questions about the nature of matter” (3), and to what extent are these fundamental questions displaced? Because its emphasis on “discontinuity” and “indeterminacy” serve to (mis)represent new materialism as “new,” I turn briefly to some of the recent history of contemporary cultural theory before examining subjectivity in the new materialists’ treatment of matter.

4.4

Four

Even prior to the contemporary “material turn,” the attack on materialism in the postwar era had to undertake the rewriting of materialism’s central concepts, hollowing them out of any connection to the material world of labor. This made “materialism” safe while allowing material contradictions resulting from increased exploitation to develop without any radical challenge from the left. The speculative theory dominated by poststructuralism since the 1960s—post-al theory—emptied the philosophical basis of materialism in part through its critique of essence and identity, which, as Derrida contends, are always “in advance contaminated, that is, preoccupied, inhabited, haunted by [their] other” (Specters of Marx 201), rendering any category—such as capital or labor or the mode of production—continually riven by its opposite and thus subject to an endless chain of significations that can only be arrested by a violent epistemological closure. This is a point emphasized in Cheah’s essay, “Non-Dialectical Materialism” in New Materialisms. In arguing for a materiality of the text, Cheah draws upon Derrida’s argument that the project of deconstruction

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can be understood as “materialist” only to the extent that “matter”— normally equated with logocentric notions of “presence,” “thing” and “reality”—is re-understood as “radical alterity” (Derrida, Positions 64) which treats matter as “the figure of the text in general” insofar as presence “becomes part of a limitless weave of forces or an endless process or movement of referral” that is “arrested” by metaphysical concepts like presence (Cheah 72–73). Presence is always undermined by a lack (absence), and vice versa, rendering such concepts epistemologically unreliable. Such a critique inevitably leads to the deconstruction of appeals to empirical reality, and especially to any appeals to a correspondence between language and empirical reality, which is dismissed as “ontotheology and the metaphysics of presence” (Derrida, Of Grammatology 50), and which has been highly effective in undermining the theoretical basis of understanding the fundamentally exploitative relation between labor and capital (a binary which, after Derrida, is systematically equated with presentism and shown to deconstruct itself). Far from a determining basis of reality, then, the material world becomes—on the basis of such rewritings—a concept shot through with difference (radical alterity), in effect dismantling the (“metaphysical”) distinctions between presence/absence, material/spiritual, cause/effect, etc., on which materialism depends. In the postwar period, “matter”— that which has an objective existence independent of consciousness—soon came to signify, for instance, the “matter” of textuality (with Derrida and Barthes), the body or the opacity of corporeality (with Butler), and (with the later cultural turn) discourse, which unlike “textuality,” refers to a speaking subject, i.e., a subject with a body. On these terms, if discourse is material there can be no final (authoritative) meaning, such as the “reason” that is taken to be the essence of the subject in the Enlightenment theory of knowledge. Along similar lines, the very question of ontology—as object-oriented philosophers like Graham Harman emphasize—was denounced as a logocentric will to power and “being” itself was increasingly subject to erasure, following the continental philosophy of the early twentieth century—for instance, phenomenology and existentialism—which bracketed the existence of the objective world on the grounds that it could only be known at the level of its effects on the senses in any case. In fact, after Derrida, ontology—the “ontology of presence as actual reality and as objectivity”—becomes “hauntology.” As Derrida explains, “it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a

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concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology” (Specters of Marx 202). Any effort “to deploy the possibility of dissipating the phantom... of bringing this representation back to the world of labour, production, and exchange, so as to reduce it to its conditions,” as Marx does in his analysis of the congealed labor hidden in the commodity form, is itself “a conjuration” that ignores the phantom status of objectivity (Specters of Marx 214). Even the culturalism that developed in distinction from textual materialism and that sought to address the more “concrete” practices of “culture” nevertheless took these deconstructive hauntings of essence and identity as their starting point, and, following Derrida, avoided at all costs “bringing back” representation to “the world of labour” and “its conditions,” and substituted for it a cultural materialism that focused on the experiential particularities and excessive contingencies of culture as themselves constitutive of reality. Culturalism essentially reduced ontology to non-totalizable “bits” (Gary Hall, Culture in Bits ). In the wake of global economic crises of the twenty-first century, however, even these rewritings of the material are losing their effectiveness. This is made clear in Coole and Frost’s comments mentioned above about the limits of the cultural turn (and these comments of course follow a long line of challenges in recent decades, especially by the “new communists,” Badiou, Žižek, Hardt and Negri, et al.). Today textualism is largely viewed as bankrupt—its emphasis on language found to be too determining and its celebration of free play now revealed as too close to the anti-state mantras of neoliberalism— and culturalism more broadly is seen as having ignored the economic relations that everywhere are erupting through cultural surfaces. Social theory requires a new basis upon which to spiritualize—with a green aroma—the increasingly evident interconnections and contradictions of the global world. It requires a planetary pantheism. It has found a new theoretical basis in the “posthuman orientation” to ontology (Coole and Frost 7) that is at the center of the new materialism and many other new theoretical trends, such as animal studies, biopolitics, the “spectral turn” and object-oriented philosophy. Yet, as I have begun to suggest, all of the favorite tropes of deconstruction (“undecidability,” “indeterminacy,” “unpredictability,” opposition to the “dogma” of “determination” and “economism”) remain firmly entrenched in the new materialist approach to ontology (hence Cheah’s poststructuralist essay is prominently placed in the collection), which it has hybridized with the new terminological

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“currency” of various scientific discourses. To restate an argument I have made throughout this book, the primary role of the undecidable is to render exploitative relations undecidable and thus suspend any serious (transformative) change of private property relations. Bourgeois theory in its most sophisticated forms, for this reason, can abandon any specific idiom in which the undecidable is elaborated, but it can never give up undecidability.

4.5

Five

According to theorists like Bennett, Coole, Frost and Cheah, changes in the understanding of the material world—which they isolate from the social relations of production and attribute to technological and scientific advances (e.g., biogenetics, teletechnologies, nanotech)—have put in crisis traditional humanist values and with them the humanist model of subjectivity. The new materialists emphasize that the humanist subject informing the classical science of Descartes and Newton posits a false essential (ontological) difference between the subject and the object that situates the human subject as an active agent in relation to its object. This object is assumed to be fundamentally distinct from (rather than “entangled with”) the subject, and capable of being known and controlled by the subject. According to posthumanist theory, on the basis of its ontological dualism humanism assumes the possibility of developing objective knowledge of the external world, and, moreover, sees the world of nature as there for humanity’s taking, without regard for the environmental consequences. Elaborating on these subject-object relations in her essay “The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh,” Diana Coole writes that the classical view of matter sees it as “inert” and “essentially passive stuff, set in motion by human agents who use it as a means of survival, modify it as a vehicle of aesthetic expression, and impose subjective meanings upon it”; matter relative to the subject is thus “devoid of agency” (92) in the humanist model. Repeating the cultural turn’s dogma that the most important battles should be fought not against the material relations of exploitation but theoretical “essentialism,” Coole’s argument suggests that any ontology that posits a difference between subject and object, human and nonhuman, is a deeply “unethical” approach to the world. Such new developments as biogenetics, along with other scientific discoveries and technologies, have thrown the traditional humanist subject even further

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into crisis. The “crisis of the subject,” new materialists suggest, is a daily reality and not just a textual decentering. They claim it is no longer possible to ignore the way in which humans are “embedded in a material world” in which our actions have (un/intended) and often destructive consequences for the bio and eco spheres, not just the human sphere. Andrew Poe speaks to the new posthumanist theoretical consensus when he writes, “The subject, it seems, has come to care too much for itself,” and he refers to this subject-focus as an “exceptionalism” that denies objects agency (153, 154). Just as troubling for posthumanist theorists is that the classical (Cartesian, Newtonian) model of subjectivity presumes that it can obtain reliable knowledge, allowing the subject to predict how matter will operate under certain (future) circumstances; it conceives matter as “subject to predictable causal forces” (Coole and Frost 9). Causal forces that allow people to reliably understand the workings of the natural and social world are assumed to be falsely and unethically imposed on the world by the human subject; whereas “contingency” and randomness—what Cheah refers to the “absolute chance” (83) that is at the core of material existence—are assumed to speak the authentic (e.g., non-imposed, nonmediated) language of being. Because “there is no longer a quantitative relationship between cause and effect,” in the words of Coole and Frost (14), the new materialists affirm the “aleatory” nature of all reality (14) by celebrating the “contingent, disparate capacities to structure that emerge haphazardly through corporeal practices” (Coole 102) and rejoice in “the element of unpredictability and indeterminacy in action” (Bennett, “A Vitalist Stopover” 61). The new posthumanist ontological re-orientation in the (post)humanities treats the crisis of the subject as primarily a crisis of (cultural) values, which are seen as no longer capable of responding to new realities. Theorists, in this context, regularly marshal as evidence “events” which reveal the human subject to be not so much in control of the world as controlled by it: a subjected subject whose intention is often subverted by the material world—a subject always already at the mercy of “the mismatch between actions, intentions, and consequences” (Coole and Frost 16). Or, in the words of Bennett, whose essay in New Materialisms is developed out of her influential book Vibrant Matter, great attention is given to “the capacity of things…to impede or block the will and designs of humans” because these things “act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies

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of their own” (Vibrant Matter viii), as I discussed in Chapter Three. What Bennett calls “thing-power” in “A Vitalist Stopover” (48) closely echoes cultural theory’s catastrophe fetish, fed by glorifying ever-more spectacular evidence of the human subject’s failure to know the world. Following Nietzsche, rational human agency is taken to be one of the most “mendacious” narratives of history (“On Truth” 42). Indeed, the subject’s claim to know is dismissed in posthumanist theory as the effect of a broader field of human “fantasies” (Orlie 120). Of course, what therefore quickly emerges from the “postdualist” ontology is less a hybrid ontology than a reversal that privileges the object as a reified “thing” that mystically eludes understanding. (And at that point it is easy enough to deify the thing as an “other” that “resists” knowing in order to appear “ethical” [cf. Ahmed 254].) But what posthumanist theorists call the crisis of the subject is itself rooted in material relations—which remain in the background of analysis of even the most ardent enthusiasts of new materialism. The humanist subject is increasingly seen as outdated not because its humancenteredness is now seen as unethical or even because of new technologies. The new technologies (including biotech and nanotechnologies) and the new approach to ethics are themselves driven by changes in production. What is obscured by new materialism is the structural crisis reached by capital—due to the falling rate of profit—which has meant, especially in the last decade, a new round of attacks on labor in the effort to increase profits on the one hand and, on the other, the hoarding, on the part of capitalists, of trillions of dollars in capital rather than risk “unprofitable” investment. Any and all previously public programs and resources—from education and healthcare to water—are rapidly being privatized, as the inverted relations of wages and profit reaches continually deepens with union membership still at record lows despite upticks in union organizing in the 2010s and early 2020s and worker protections under attack. These relations (and not simply “matter” as such) have made everyday life precarious and unpredictable. This is especially the case with healthcare in the US. The new posthumanist ontology claims to establish an entirely new hybrid notion of the human subject as thoroughly “embedded” in the world and thus unable to know the world in any reliable way. But far from resisting “instrumentalized” approaches to the world, it is itself an instrument of capitalist ideology. The new posthumanist

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subject has become necessary to naturalize the increasingly unpredictable, crisis-ridden world of global capital. The relations of wage labor today mean not only that working people increasingly struggle to survive while a tiny few own virtually all social and natural resources, but that the material world that is a product of social labor is increasingly an alien world, beyond the producers’ control. Under these relations of commodity production, “the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things” (Marx, Capital I 164–165). The new materialists do not just take the surface of commodity life for granted, they glorify a commodified vision of the material world in which the subject is forever alienated from her labor and learns to embrace this powerlessness relative to the world. This is another way of saying that the increasingly popular theoretical framework within which objects as objects are given a new autonomy and agency independent of their producers, and the (human) subject is itself reduced to the matter of corporeality whose agency is neither based on labor nor rational thinking but the microdynamics and “creative contingency” (Coole and Frost 20) of its biological nature—is the epitome of commodity fetishism. In fact, many of the new materialist writings read as bad parodies of Marx’s first chapter of Capital. They celebrate rather than critique the material conditions under which “Their own movement within society has for them [workers] the form of a movement made by things, and these things, far from being under their control, in fact control them” (167–168). Instead of analyzing the historical conditions under which the object has assumed an even more global and powerful subjectivity, while the vast majority of people have been reduced to the “bare life” of objects, the products of social labor (and not the labor that produces them) take the center stage of left theory. Having erased the labor that produces the material world, by the same logic, the new materialism assigns objects and matter an independent, self-transforming agency or an “inherent exuberance” (Coole 99). What is really an index of profound social alienation resulting from private property relations is turned upside down by the new materialists into a magical sign of the “vitality” of matter and the natural world in which “these things, far from being under [workers’] control, in fact control them” (Marx, Capital I 167–168). To put this another way, the new decentered subject of posthumanist ontology—for whom matter emerges as the site of uncontrollable, unknowable contingency—is the subject of austerity

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who is expected to accept as inevitable the dictates of capital. It is the insecure subject for whom there will be no social security, the subject for whom daily life is increasingly unpredictable, subject to chance, to the market. Which is to say that the posthumanist ontology imports into “matter” the irrational, apparently lawless dynamics of human life under a global market and then re-situates this market logic as the post-logic of nature and matter itself. This is the double-move by which the new materialists foster the illusion of the inevitability of the world as it is. But this is the double-move of metaphysics in a more general sense in class societies, one they inherit from (among others) Spinoza’s metaphysics, which translates the logic of exchange into a philosophical system of self-causing substance. In this way, (new materialist) metaphysics obscures the fact that, the more capitalist relations “settle everywhere” around the world, the more socialized production becomes, the more the material foundations are laid for socialism, the wresting of freedom from necessity by the revolutionary collective. Behind the contemporary turn to “matter” is the corporate need to divert attention from the growing contradictions between the socialized forces of production—which make it possible to feed, clothe, educate and provide healthcare for all—and the property relations that ensure social production is privatized in the interests of the few. While the right-wing of capital produces a vehemently antigovernment subject who sees ethics as a ruse of the federal government to give “entitlements” to the “other” and who rejects social programs as “handouts,” the new materialist subject is the “caring” left-wing subject of capital for whom ethics paves the way to a “fairer” capitalism—a discourse of redistribution. “Fairness” is the banner of those seeking not to end the relations that produce unfairness, but to continue exploitation on less egregious (“inhumane”) terms. Its main goal is to disappear the system of capital that produces a widening gap between exploited and exploiter. But it doesn’t just try to convince workers that they should be exploited even more. It insists that they should find it “in themselves” to willingly demand such exploitation as a sign of their ethical commitments—even in the face of brutal cuts to the services they rely on to survive by their caring bosses. “Fairness” is a cover for making the workers pay for the crisis. To be clear, owing to the fact that the attribution of life and agency to things is a class ideology, the right also deploys the same matterism, but without concealing its commitment to capital accumulation. The blurring of the line between human and nonhuman in the legal

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realm, for instance, has been enormously consequential for capital with the Supreme Court Ruling of 2010 in favor of Citizens United, which extended people’s right to contribute to election campaigns to corporations, and political conservatives can oppose the “discrimination” against such inanimate objects as “coal” (in the words of Governor of Montana Gregg Gianforte in calling for expansion at the federal level of the coal industry (Koutsobinas)). To put this another way, while right-wing discourse normalizes the heightened competition of capital’s private property relations, the new materialism translates the increased socialization of productive forces under capitalism into a “vibrant” force of matter itself (“thing-power”) so as to assert the force of “weak thinking” (Vattimo) and the messianic vision of the left which says goodbye to the working class as the agent of change. It thereby naturalizes (de-historicizes) production, rendering impossible the collective transformation of private property relations that is necessary for freedom from necessity. New materialists like Bennett readily admit their approach to the world “will not solve the problem of human exploitation or oppression” but propose that “it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations. And in a knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm oneself. Such an enlightened or expanded notion of self-interest is good for humans” (Bennett, Vibrant Matter 13). New materialism acknowledges that it has little influence (let alone interest) in addressing the most pressing of social contradictions and in fact substitutes for political projects committed to emancipation a new ethics of equality through “feeling.” But in the name of feeling it in fact manufactures the illusion that a worker’s “harming” of one section of the “web” by, for instance, being inattentive to the contingent assemblages of human-nonhuman actants, eating factory-farmed meat, or not recycling, is ultimately the same as a corporation’s theft of surplus value, decision to fire workers, cut their benefits or pollute the environment. It would be more precise to say that this “newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers” is “good” for the specific class interests of the human owners of capital. New materialism is good for the bourgeoisie because it perpetuates the (green) class mythology that “we are all in this together,” when in fact class relations ensure that all the sacrifices in support of the common “web” come from the property-less, who have been reduced to the status of things. The brutal response of capital and its state to the COVID-19 epidemic,

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allowing millions to die and many more millions to become seriously ill so as to return to business as usual, is only among the most overt forms in which the de-humanization of working people manifests. Both the right and left subjects of capital, in short, obscure the foundation of the social in labor and production. But, trained to see oneself “enmeshed” in multiple “interlocking systems” in which all people, regardless of class, are implicated, and (still) seduced by the culturalist claim that there is no longer any “outside” from which to wage a struggle to end capitalism, the feeling-green left subject is a more effective subject for the advanced sectors of (transnational) capital. It is attentive to the (unavoidable) interconnectedness of production and consumption, rich and poor, the human and the nonhuman worlds. Yet precisely on this basis it refuses the “binary” thinking and explanatory knowledges that make it possible to understand (and thus transform) the class structures that shape human life.

4.6

Six

Arguments that emphasize the hybrid nature of subject-object relations are, to repeat, given pride of place in new materialist analyses because they seem to embody a “postdualist ontology” (Coole 100). In her reading of Merleau-Ponty, for instance, Coole emphasizes the concept of “fold” because it highlights, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, the “reflexivity of the sensible” whereby it becomes “impossible to distinguish between what sees [or touches] and what is seen [or touched]” (as qtd. in Coole 104). From within this ontological framework, one cannot—and, as an ethical subject, should not—determine where nature ends and where the human begins. Ethics is attentive to this very indeterminacy. However, it is precisely in such arguments that one can begin to discern more clearly the philosophical revisionism that underwrites the new materialist ontology and that ends up turning materialism into aesthetics. Acknowledging a difference between the subject and object (of knowledge) is in fact central not just to humanism but to materialism. It is even a basic (practical) understanding in the natural sciences and the traditions of science the new materialists claim to support (e.g., Einstein, the new biology, nanotech). In the philosophical tradition of materialism, one of the central questions is: does the world exist independently of the

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subject and its consciousness, or is the world the product of consciousness—either of the individual (in the case of subjective idealism) or of Spirit, God, etc. (in the case of objective idealism)? In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin’s exhaustive critique of the “new materialists” of his day who attempted to revise materialism into a new subjective idealism, Lenin explains that “Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them” (127). Here he emphasizes two important issues. First, for materialism, the world exists independently of the subject and is therefore independent—different—from it. It exists with or without the (human) subject. Second, and at the same time, this does not mean that the subject and object are fundamentally separate, for the material world is “reflected” in the sensations and mind of the subject. This is the case because the human subject is a dialectical product of nature. It has evolved through the practice of labor. Marx in fact calls this the “metabolic” relation of nature and labor. As Lenin shows, “in order really to know an object we must embrace, study, all its sides, all connections and ‘mediations’.” Therefore, “a full ‘definition’ of an object must include the whole of human experience, both as a criterion of the truth and as a practical indicator of its connection with human wants” (“Once Again on Trade Unions” 485). This is another way of saying that for Lenin, “reflection” is a labor process. It is through the generations of human labor that humans conceptualize the world around them. Both in the sense that, through the dialectical relation of nature and labor, humans create tools and products by which humans meet their needs, and in the sense that the intellectual labor of conceptualization itself depends upon human production. Through these productive practices of labor, under definite social relations, humans have evolved to be able to understand nature in increasingly complex ways. And, as Lenin argues, conceptual, abstract knowledges that go beyond feeling and experience are necessary because “abstraction reflects nature more deeply, truly and completely” (Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic 171). The new materialists accept the first aspect of the basic idea of matter— that it denotes an objective existence—but formally reject the second aspect—that it is “reflected” in the human subject, or that the subject’s ideas “correspond” at an abstract level to the objective world. “[T]he illusion of representational correspondence,” as Coole puts it in her annotation of Merleau-Ponty’s critique of materialism, is “sheer mysticism”

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(100). But, as Lenin argues, “Acceptance or rejection of the concept matter is a question of the confidence man places in the evidence of his sense-organs, a question of the source of our knowledge, a question which has been asked and debated from the very inception of philosophy” (Materialism and Empirio-Criticism 128). New materialists are quite confident that matter exists independently of the subject, but, following the textualist critique of representation, they oppose the idea that the material world is “reflected” in the human subject and they are quick to reject the slightest suggestion that humans have the capacity to reliably know the world or to comprehend it as a totality. Which is another way of saying that, despite their criticisms of “dualist” ontology, posthumanist theory in effect establishes a fundamental (unbridgeable) gap between the subject and the object that prevents the subject from conceptually understanding the material world. Like the Feuerbachian and Berkeleian speculative materialism that claimed that, while matter exists, the concepts we use to understand it, like order and causality, are only imposed on nature by humans, the new materialists are only “confident” in the sensory experiences of the objective world and only insofar as their senses affirm (their belief in) the fundamental contingency of the world. Which is why Lenin calls this (experiential) theory of knowledge “fideism” (“faith based” religious obscurantism). It is not therefore a coincidence that new materialists de-center human knowledge, only to recenter human “ethics,” which reflects the belief that how humans “feel” (belief, desire, values, etc.) is more important than understanding things as they are in reality. Concepts, new materialists suggest, do not—indeed cannot—reflect objective aspects of matter itself. It is significant in this context that while new materialists distance themselves from both the “mechanical” approach to matter and to Kant’s dualism (Coole 99), in the actual conclusions they draw they are mechanistic Kantians. Kant of course argued that we cannot know the world “in itself,” we can only know its effects on the subject. Insofar as the new materialists insist both on the existence of the objective world and on its (non-appropriable) “vitality” (Coole 94) and “contingency” (Coole and Frost 28) they in effect place the “cause” or origin of matter beyond the reach of human understanding (concepts). But as Engels argues, “In mechanics the causes of motion are taken as given and their origin is disregarded, only their effects being taken into account” (Dialectics of Nature 55). Mechanical materialism, in other words, is not mechanical for positing determination, as new materialists claim. Rather, it is

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precisely for putting causality and determination beyond human understanding that certain modes of materialism are mechanical. From this standpoint, far from moving beyond mechanical materialism, the new materialists in fact update it. They banish from the material world a dogmatic Deity, a divine first cause, only to import into the material world a spiritual impulse. Instead of an orthodox (and discredited) religious approach, the new materialists seek to “rediscover” a “certain energy in the pulsation of existence” (Coole 92). Bennett likewise suggests, “This materialism, which eschews the life-matter binary and does not believe in God or spiritual forces, nevertheless also acknowledges the presence of an indeterminate vitality—albeit one that resists confinement to a stable hierarchy—in the world” (“A Vitalist Stopover” 63). Bennett makes clear here that “vibrant matter” is “vibrant” precisely because it is “indeterminate,” because its immanent yet unknowable “agency” exceeds humans’ ability to understand its determination(s), since the hierarchies, if they exist, are always changing. The notion of the “contingent” “agency” of matter as the “event” that is both constitutive of the human and beyond human understanding is perhaps best described by Engels in his critique of Georges Cuvier: “In place of a single divine creation, he put a whole series of repeated acts of creation, making the miracle an essential natural agent”; he was thus “revolutionary in phrase and reactionary in substance” (Dialectics of Nature 10). Indeed, miraculous materialism is an apt name for the new materialism outlined by Bennett, Coole and Frost et al. And central to its “reactionary substance” is the positing of experience as the only way to fully appreciate miraculous matter. To experience matter, new materialists suggest, is to encounter matter prior to cognition, which imposes “false” ways of thinking, like conceptualizing matter as reflecting “hierarchies” of determination or “history.” The fantasy of an unmediated experience of matter takes a particularly cynical form in Coole’s reading of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. On the one hand, she shows that Merleau-Ponty embraces romantics like Shelling for his effort to see the “exuberance” (99) of matter but is critical of the way that this leads to an aesthetic intuitionalism, because it assumes an “identification” between subject and object. In this way, she distances herself and Merleau-Ponty from “romantic” “mysticism” (100). On the other hand, Coole, following Merleau-Ponty, treats Cézanne’s impressionism not as an articulation of a historical modality of conceptualizing the world, but as somehow grasping reality itself without mediation. “Cézanne’s painting suspends these [reifying linguistic] habits of thought

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and reveals the basis of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself” (104). Cézanne’s form of painting is a historical development— an abstraction made possible under certain social conditions in the West. But Merleau-Ponty and Coole isolate impressionism from history and treat it as revealing “perception” without abstraction. Having critiqued an earlier form of romantic mysticism, Coole goes on to advance another. Materialist dialectics of nature, as Engels and Lenin emphasize, seeks to understand nature and the agency of (inanimate) matter in its full complexity. However, rather than assume one does this in the absence of human thinking/culture, it acknowledges that the only way to accurately (comprehensively) understand nature is to develop scientific knowledge of it—which is the result of hundreds of thousands of years of human development (human’s dialectical relation to nature). Thus when Coole insists, with regard to Euclid, that “The challenge is to suspend this [Euclid’s] culturally fashioned perception in order to uncover the ‘vertical’ world of ‘brute’ or ‘wild’ perception as it emerges” (105), she relapses back into mysticism and erases the profound role of Euclid in arriving at contemporary scientific theories of nature. But there is no Heisenberg or Merleau-Ponty without Descartes and Euclid, all of whom became who they were, and advanced their ideas, at particular stages of sociohistorical development. If it did not signal such a profound step backward for cultural theory, new materialism’s rejection of Marxism for its “illusion” of correspondence between thought and the material world, on the one hand, and, on the other, new materialism’s unabashed desire for “unfettered communication with the world” (Coole 99)—i.e., for aesthetic experiences in which it is “impossible to say that nature ends here and that man or expression starts here” (Merleau-Ponty as qtd. in Coole 104)—would simply be rather amusing. But, as I have suggested, this is a mark of the compromise that the left has made with capital. It has adopted the language of science only insofar as science affirms that the world remains “rippled with hidden recesses, shadows and shade, secrets and anonymity” (Coole 113) and abandons the scientific approach to the social as mode of production. For all its appeal to science, the new materialism is entrenched in a mystifying aestheticism. Take, for instance, such new materialist statements about capital as the following: “Whatever passes through these economic circuits is redistributed to the material advantage of some rather than others, while entering into systemic relations that outrun the comprehension or

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intentions of individual actors” (Coole and Frost 30). When it comes to offering cutting-edge explanation of contemporary capitalism, what Coole and Frost’s arguments instead reveal is that new materialism aims primarily to observe the effects of “economic circuits”—the increasingly unavoidable social inequalities erupting everywhere on the surfaces of capitalist culture—while suggesting that the deeper-lying causes of these effects are unknowable and “for the most part unpredictable” (29). Instead of departing from mainstream economic mantras, such claims repeat in a left idiom the defenses of the market put forward by such figures as former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, who in his testimony to the Congressional Oversight Committee for the role he played in the 2008 credit crisis insisted that no one could have predicted the “once-in-a-century credit tsunami” (Lanman and Matthews). Kant, of course, in discussing the sublime, insisted that one should look at the ocean, not in terms of its causal dynamics but “as the poets do” (Critique of Judgment ). That is to say, without attempting to explain it or understand it, but only in terms of how it strikes the senses, or how it appears. The sublime is precisely what Greenspan appeals to when he insists that the economic crisis, like a tsunami, could not have been foreseen. In an exemplary aesthetic gesture, new materialism likewise places the laws of both nature and the social beyond human comprehension and, in effect, produces a subject attentive to inequality and simultaneously convinced that any effort to understand its roots—to grasp a particular instance of inequality in relation to the social totality—will fail, since material reality inevitably “outrun[s] the comprehension” of individuals (Coole and Frost 30). This is precisely the subject needed by capital to look upon the unfolding economic contradictions as instances of the Kantian sublime—and it is no accident that new materialists like Bennett (The Enchantment of Modern Life; Vibrant Matter) and Ian Bogost (Alien Phenomenology), dismiss critique as an unethical effort to find causal relations at work in the material world and call instead for a return to “wonder,” or the re-enchantment of the material that celebrates ethical “openness” to unpredictability and surprise as a more authentic approach to materiality. The aesthetic subject is the subject especially needed in the era of what Naomi Klein calls “shock and awe” capitalism (Shock Doctrine). Today more than ever capital requires a subject whose attentiveness to her senses keeps her diverted from the underlying structure that makes

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possible the increasingly devastating attacks on social programs. Capital needs a “gated” subject imprisoned in her own experience. To intervene into capitalist relations one should not embrace the experiences that lead one to conclude that reality is inherently unpredictable and resistant to human knowledge and control. Far from reflecting a more “authentic” (human-decentered) approach to reality, this is the marketcentered fantasy of a world without regulation. This is, in other words, the “non-human” world refracted through the very property relations that continue to put human and natural life at risk. Not only does this fantasy disappear the deeper-lying relations that structure human experience; the focus on aesthetics of social and natural life also cultivates new consumer subjects who are more inclined to change lifestyle habits and patterns of thinking in line with new green industries but who see anything more than such local changes as arrogant, if not totalitarian. Instead of uncritically affirming the experience of uncertainty, one should seek to unearth the social structures that have made material life “indeterminate.” They do not originate in some mysterious, universal quality of “life itself” but in the historical relations of human life. I have suggested that at the core of the aesthetic approach is an experientialism that locates the world of matter in the subject’s experience of the objective world, particularly at the level of the body and corporality (because, again, new materialists claim this avoids the dualism and hierarchy of the humanist subject). We are all “kin,” Bennett argues, because we all have bodies. By doing so, however, new materialists reject the materialist position that existence is the outside of consciousness and instead inscribe it within experience (the body), as Nietzsche taught. The new materialists thus end up with a blurry romanticism in which the human subject and matter are joined in an exuberant unity, a pan-matterism in which it is impossible to make political priorities based on class consciousness and which installs an activism motivated by the intensity of feeling. Feeling the world needs to change and performing that change in the micro-spaces of the daily becomes more important than knowing how and why it changes owing to struggles over global property relations. Here, it is important to note Melissa Orlie’s text “Impersonal Matter” since it goes even further in its denunciation of concepts and history. Orlie reads Nietzsche’s will to power as an “impersonal” theory of materialism that eschews the relation between subject and object and, ultimately, substance. Thus Orlie’s text shows how new materialism brings with it a whole romantic matrix of assumptions in the name of a view of

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nature “free from culture” and especially the “rigidities” of thought. More specifically, Orlie re-reads Nietzsche to put forward a new objective idealism. “Will to power,” Orlie argues, is “an impersonal force within our lives rather than as a personal one that is the property of individuals” (118). On this basis, “what is conveniently called a self is actually a complex of competing drives” (119). For Nietzsche, “mind is body” and thus mind is a “trajectory of matter” (120, 121). Tellingly, however, Orlie does not explain why we “remain attached to a sovereign conception of subjectivity” (120) except by insisting that we are “positively averse to the experience of impersonality” (120)—which is to repeat precisely what needs to be explained. The implication is that we are just “naturally” opposed to the way we “naturally” are. But this itself is contradictory. It raises the question of why humans became “averse” to the way they naturally are! The essay avoids answering this and instead argues that when confronted with the real fact of impersonal matter we cannot control, we spontaneously create “fantasies” of sovereignty and mastery (121). Ultimately, Orlie’s essay makes clear that what is at stake is a deeper, affirmative experience of what already exists. Orlie suggests that to be “strong” willed is really to accept and immerse oneself in all experience (123–125)—including suffering. At the same time, having a strong will is “not to will”—to “suspend decision” (130). Which is another way of celebrating “regression” (132) to a “sublimated” state of “differentiated unity” which fosters creativity (132–133). This emphasis is of course very similar to Cheah’s and Derrida’s celebration of “passivity,” not to mention Gianni Vattimo’s “weak marxism” (see, for instance, Ecce Comu and his Hermeneutic Communism, co-written with Santiago Zabala) and Agamben on “potentiality” (Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy). William E. Connolly’s contribution to New Materialisms (“Materialities of Experience”) is also significant in this context—namely its defense of popular culture (Six Feet Under, Waking Life) for its depictions of “action suspended experience” (194) that, as in Merleau-Ponty, helps overcome “resentment” and cultivates a “positive existential attachment” (195) to others. The valorization of the weak is part of the same conceptual move undertaken by Hardt and Negri to establish “love” as the heart of the commons. It is no wonder that for new materialists the “oppositional ways of thinking” associated with “critique” (Coole and Frost 8) must give way to “affirmation” and “positive” thinking (108) as the mark of radicality today.

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4.7

Seven

If the older forms of culturalism (e.g., Derrida, Butler, Hall, etc.) treated matter in terms of language and cultural inscription (what new materialists call “constructivism”), new materialism re-articulates matter often in terms of the natural sciences, especially the matter of biology and physics. Both the old and “new” appeals to matter however erase the historical foundation of matter, and put in its place the “matter” of such things as language, the body, cells, particles, light waves, which are all read as resistant to conceptual thought and history-defying. Thus Coole and Frost emphasize that “On entering the realm of subatomic particles one finds an even more quixotic and elusive sense of matter” (Coole and Frost 11). As with the earlier textual/cultural materialism, “matter” here is equated not so much with the philosophical tradition of materialism for which matter has an objective existence independent of the consciousness of the (human) individual, but as that which resists individual comprehension/ control. Matter, on these terms, subverts human agency. This is particularly evident in the posthumanist obsession with disaster and what Coole and Frost call the “mismatches” between human intention and practice (16). Such treatment of matter is one-sided in its privileging of what science may not know (now). That is to say, it fetishizes the existing limits of science, which are understood in local, culturalist terms (the God of the gaps apologetics, again). New materialism places under erasure the historical limits of science that are themselves rooted in the mode of production. It consequently leaves out the social conditions in which such things as language, the body and subatomic particles become meaningful. In his critique of the natural sciences, Marx draws attention to this tendency in science to abstract the object of analysis from history. The “weaknesses of the abstract materialism of natural science” stem from the fact that it is “a materialism which excludes the historical process” (Capital I 494n4). Excluding the historical relations of technology, for instance, means ignoring that “[t]echnology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations” (493n4). Like technology, science reveals the relation of humans to nature, “the direct process of the production of [human] life and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations” (ibid). Not only are

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the tools of science produced by labor (under specific class conditions) but the very ability to recognize particular objects and dynamics presupposes a certain stage of development (not just the discourses that Foucault identified, but the structure of labor relations that make scientific discourses possible and that shape the form they take). To leave out the class relations in which subatomic particles, light waves and microbes, for instance, are (now) conceived of as the basis of the material world not only occludes the exploited labor on which scientific discovery depends under capitalism and bypasses the question of why scientific advances are largely put out of reach of the vast majority of humanity. Leaving out the historical conditions of matter also reifies what Teresa Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh call the “local modalities of matter.” Matter, as they explain in Class in Culture, is not a sign or any other physical body, nor is it the self-alienated spirit or an intervention to support atheism (George Berkeley). To identify matter with an object, an indivisible atom or any immutable substance/motion, or to equate it with a quanta of light, zero-dimensional point particles, or one-dimensional “strings” (“superstring theory”), is to make the local modalities of matter absolute and to yield to the urge for physicalism and its metaphysical twin (unchanging substance), in bourgeois philosophy and its ontology and epistemology. Matter is objective reality in history—materialism; it is not corporeality—matterism. (41)

The new materialists absolutize the “local modalities of matter” (41) by treating matter as an object. As a consequence, they foster the physicalism that isolates (reifies) objects from the relations which make them possible. Inquiry into the micro-levels of matter should not become an excuse for theoretical myopia. New developments in biology and genetics are leading to many important new advances, but they are shaped by the contradictions of capitalism. Recent research on the human microbiome is a case in point. The microbiome is the “resident community of microbes” in and outside the human body “helping us to digest food, strengthen our immune systems, and keep dangerous enemy pathogens from invading our tissues and organs” (Mueller et al. 1246). Microbes (including for instance bacteria and viruses) represent trillions of cells living in the human body and they are increasingly being found to play important roles not just in keeping people healthy but in causing or contributing to illness when imbalances occur in the microbiome. Because the microbiome is

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being potentially linked, for instance, to cancer, autism, inflammatory bowel disease, and asthma, further study has the potential to lead to new, integrative understandings of a wide range of medical diagnoses and thus also new treatments that can help improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people. In the process, it is certainly the case that older ways of thinking about many other concepts will be undone to develop better, more precise understandings, and new concepts will emerged to analyze new dimensions of biological matter. In this regard, a 2008 Nature editorial, in commenting on the microbiome of the human gut, suggests that microbes “contribute so much to human biology that it is difficult to say where the body ends and the microbes begin — which is why several massive projects have now started up to characterize the human microbiota in its entirety” (“Who Are We?” 563). One example is The Human Microbiome Project, starting in 2007, was “a 5-year, US$115-million effort to study the microbial communities inhabiting several regions of the human body... and how those communities influence human health and disease” (“The Human Environment” 689). In fact, studies of the microbiome point to the need for more “ecological” approaches to the understanding of the body, to understand more comprehensively how systems within the body work together (Mueller et al. 1246). But under capitalism, these developments are driven by the relations of profit and the results will be commodified. And today this commodification takes place on an ever larger scale, as capital’s commodity relations become ever more generalized worldwide and the social welfare states are under devastating attack, leading to the privatization of formally nationalized healthcare systems. Privatization is so normalized in mainstream culture in fact that a 2013 Supreme Court ruling preventing the patenting of human genes was reported by media primarily in terms of what this will mean for private companies and corporate profits (Pollack). Proponents of new biology, biotech, nanotech, etc., should be defending the need for social science, which is to say people’s science. They should aggressively support new developments in science not because they establish the aesthetic qualities of matter, but because they are made possible by social resources that all people should benefit from. Cultural theory should resist the myopia that legitimates the market and instead boldly seek to relate discoveries and their implications to the social totality. It should re-claim the social basis of privatized science and defend the need for totalizing knowledges that can help guide radical praxis

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to bring about a world in which people’s needs, not profit, shape the priorities of science and medicine. However, the approach taken by new materialists instead more or less mirrors defenders of corporate science, because its focus is on the positive possibilities such developments reflect abstracted from the class relations which necessarily limit science to the dictates of profit. This becomes clearer upon examining the way an Economist cover story on the microbiome represents new developments. Titled “Microbes Maketh Man,” the article heralds the scientific “revolutionaries” who are currently turning the world “inside out” in their study of “what, biologically speaking, a human being is” (9). It notes that while traditional (genetic) thinking about the human body has viewed it as “a collection of 10 trillion cells which are themselves the products of 23,000 genes,” the “revolutionaries” argue that “in the nooks and crannies of every human being, and especially in his or her guts, dwells the microbiome: 100 trillion bacteria of several hundred species bearing 3m non-human genes” (9). And, following the wider posthumanist decentering of the human, the article highlights the role of the (micro) organisms (in this case “bugs” that regulate the human body and thus protect it) on which humans depend. Under a subheading titled “All In This Together,” the article articulates a similarly indeterminate view of the human and the nonhuman found in posthumanist theory, emphasizing that “the bugs are neither parasites nor passengers. They are, rather, fully paid-up members of a community” (9) of the human host, which is no longer thought of as an “individual” but an “ecosystem.” The article emphasizes the increasing “popularity” of this new scientific view of the human. However, the “popular” narratives—which are largely structured by posthumanist assumptions—omit that this re-understanding of the human body represents a new advance made possible by labor, within the exploitative structure of wage labor. Such an omission of course also erases the fact that under different social relations of production, such scientific advances could be used, not to produce profit but to advance human well-being. Popular narratives take for granted that under capitalism such medical treatments will be accessible only to those who can afford them. What makes posthumanist and new materialist theories so popular in fact is that, in the language of “nature” (“biology”), they smooth out the material contradictions of daily life, promote a flexible new notion of the human subject of labor and create a friction-free cultural imaginary necessary to capital. That is, a world in which all former boundaries breakdown:

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an inverted world which appears as a constantly changing web of interconnections which we’re “all in together” but which is in fact constantly being “re-made” to accumulate more surplus value from workers in more flexible ways, no matter the human or environmental consequences. What makes new materialism so resonant with the language of The Economist is that both articulate, more or less overtly, corporate science: the commitment to profit from science by producing market based solutions at a price rather than finding solutions that benefit all by connecting science to the historic struggle to end private property relations. As is highlighted by The Economist, new discoveries related to the microbiome point to such “promising” new directions in medicine as “more sophisticated deployment of the humble antibiotic, arguably the pharma industry’s most effective invention” (9). It is important to note in this context that the Human Microbiome Project, spearheaded by the National Institutes of Health and a consortium of other researchers, that led to the new discoveries discussed by The Economist and in many other popular culture and theoretical venues, is being backed by powerful “biocapitalists” like Craig J. Venter and the pharmaceutical industry. Just as significant, “bioinformatics” and the production of new technologies to store and analyze the immense amount of meta-data being accumulated by the project are leading to new DNA-sequencing technologies. As one report put it, there is a “race to sequence DNA faster and more cheaply” (Blow 687). This of course is deeply tied to the booming data collecting technology industry, which provides technologies not only for medicine and science but “national security.” Increasingly popular discussion of new levels of matter, like the microbiome, reflects these new developments at the level of the productive forces. Yet, perhaps most telling about The Economist is the way it has to admit that these developments will remain fettered by private property relations, and that, in fact, these developments will be used as bandaids because they are profitable and avoid structural changes needed to address underlying social causes of illness. In “The Human Microbiome,” a further development of its lead article, The Economist goes on to represent the study of the microbiome as leading to a potential means of curing malnutrition in the developing world—as if malnutrition was not rooted in the social relations of exploitation but the individual’s community of microbes. While the article cannot possibly not reference as a factor the “cultural” issues (72) that are involved in malnutrition (and here again “cultural” is the term under which economic relations disappear), the

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effect of the article is to focus on world hunger as a “microbial” matter and the way in which privatized medicine will be able to profit from dealing with it in this manner. Like new materialism, the article makes the global social relations of capitalism one of numerous factors that indeterminately contribute to the way things are, so that the way things are appear too “overwhelming” to be addressed except in local terms that never address the capitalist system itself. The privatization of science cannot produce what the hype promises because of its failure to address the underlying causes of health, for example, which lie in the existing class arrangements. Driven by advances in productive forces in the twenty-first century, the “matter” of “nature” has become one of the most effective grounds of naturalizing capitalism. Having been re-read in cultural terms as excessive (just as textuality had been), nature is more encompassing—indeed “totalizing”—than textuality or culture, for it extends beyond the “human” world to include nonhuman life. The irony is that far from reflecting an ethics that de-centers the role of the human, posthumanism and new materialism reflect an even more totalizing colonization of the cultural turn, projecting the romantic culturalist clichés of indeterminacy onto all of human and nonhuman life. This shows that it is not “human” projections (abstract concepts) onto nature that are the real issue; the issue is which abstractions are deemed legitimate and thus win the title of “truthful” and “authentic” (“natural”) representations of nature. And what counts as “truthful” under capitalism is never primarily a matter of ideas but rather the class interests ideas serve.

4.8

Eight

In her defense of vitalists like Bergson and Driesch, Bennett tellingly acknowledges that they “perhaps […] enjoyed popularity in America […] because [they were] received as […] defender[s] of freedom, of a certain open-endedness to life, in the face of a modern science whose pragmatic successes were threatening to confirm definitively the picture of the universe as a godless machine” (“A Vitalist Stopover” 49; my emphasis). But this romantic notion of freedom is exactly what makes the new materialism itself so popular with publishers and in universities today. Following posthumanist theory, it is largely received as a “defender of freedom” from instrumentality. With the corporatization of the universities, which has meant the erosion and marketization of the humanities

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on the one hand and enormous corporate funding of the sciences on the other, scholars in the humanities are increasingly put under pressure to defend their role in the market.1 New materialism is one of the ways in which theorists are helping to make the humanities “relevant” by both drawing on new developments in sciences (biogenetics, nanotech, the new biology, etc.) and by doing this in such a way that the fundamental philosophical questions get blurred over or do not get raised. It thereby provides critics of capitalist life with the “semblance of an agreement with the latest findings of the natural sciences” (Lukács, Destruction of Reason 27) while at the same time ensuring that science is not used to develop understanding of the material interconnections of social life but to reconcile people to the ways in which the world will forever be “rippled with hidden recesses” and “shadows” that defy human calculation. In this way, theorists help to keep the humanities a place where speculative knowledge not only reigns but has clear tie-ins to the corporate sciences (which are violently opposed to dialectics and steeped in positivism). In fact, centers like Arizona State’s Global Institute of Sustainability which like new materialism are part of the (post)humanities are among the few places where funding is available for the development of the humanities—not so much because they are “interdisciplinary” but because they are marketable. New materialism opens up a new market for cultural theory. It cultivates an entrepreneurial ethos in its emphasis on contingency and non-totalizable difference: the “valorization of freedom or the element of unpredictability and indeterminacy in action” (Bennett 61). But, as Engels argues, “Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence of natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work toward definite ends” (Anti-Dühring 125). By updating rather than fighting spiritualism, new materialism ends up taking the side of the free market in the great struggle over ownership of social resources. Its influence in the (post)humanities needs to be understood not as a result of its more “realist” approach but its radical rearguardism that offers subjects “the semblance of total freedom, the illusion of personal autonomy…while maintaining an attitude that continually links them with the reactionary

1 I have developed a materialist analysis of the humanities in such op-eds as “The Flattening of the Humanities: De-Education of Working Class Students at UWL,” cowritten with Rob Wilkie.

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bourgeoisie in their real dealings and renders them absolutely subservient to it” (Lukács, Destruction of Reason 22–23).

References Agamben, Giorgio, and Daniel Heller-Roazen. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Stanford University Press, 1999. Ahmed, Sara. “Orientations Matter.” New Materialisms:: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 234–257. Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. ———. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. ———. “A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism.” New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 47–69. Blow, Nathan. “Exploring Unseen Communities.” Nature, Volume 453 (29 May 2008), pp. 687–690. Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or, What It’s Like to Be a Thing. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Boysen, Benjamin, and Jesper Lundsfryd Rasmussen. “The Material Turn and the Fantasy to Undo Modernity.” The Comparatist, Volume 44 (October 2020), pp. 7–24. Cheah, Pheng. “Non-Dialectical Materialism.” New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 70–91. Connolly, William E. “Materialities of Experience.” New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 178–200. Coole, Diana. “The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh.” New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 92–115. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press, 2010. DeFazio, Kimberly and Rob Wilkie. “The Flattening of the Humanities: De-Education of Working Class Students at UWL.” La Crosse Tribune, lacrossetribune.com, 4 October 2020. https://lacrossetribune.com/opinion/ columnists/kimberly-defazio-and-rob-wilkie-flattening-of-the-humanitiesdeeducation-of-working-class-students/article_2628eb7b-fb3b-5228-8093-685 383056201.html. Deleuze, Gilles. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Zone Books, 1992.

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Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Spivak., Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. ———. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, 2006. Derrida, Jacques, Alan Bass, and Henri Ronse. Positions. University of Chicago Press, 1981. Ebert, Teresa L., and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh. Class in Culture. Paradigm Publishers, 2008. Engels, Frederick. Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science. International Publishers, 1972. ———. Dialectics of Nature. Translated by Clemens Dutt. New York: International Publishers, 1940. ———. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. Marx and Engels Selected Works in Three Volumes. Vol. III. Moscow: Progress, 1970, pp. 335–376. Frost, Samantha. “Fear and the Illusion of Autonomy.” New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 158–177. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009. Hall, Gary. Culture in Bits: The Monstrous Future of Theory. Continuum, 2002. “The Human Environment.” Nature, Volume 453 (29 May 2008), p. 689. “The Human Microbiome: Me, Myself, Us.” The Economist, 18–24 August 2012: 69–72. Kant, Immanuel, and Werner S. Pluhar. Critique of Judgment. Hackett Pub. Co., 1987. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Picador, 2008. Koutsobinas, Nick. “Montana Gov. to Newsmax: Trump ‘Unplugged’ Biden Energy Policy.” Newsmax.com. 8 April 2025. Accessed 9 April 2025. https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/greg-gianforte-coal-executive-ord ers/2025/04/08/id/1206168/. Lanman, Scott, and Steve Matthews. “Greenspan Concedes to ‘Flaw’ in His Market Ideology (Update2).” Bloomberg.com, 23 October 2008. Web. 5 October 2013. Lenin, V. I. Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Collected Works. Vol. 38. Progress Publishers, 1972, pp. 85–238. ———. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952. ———. “Once Again on Trade Unions.” Lenin: Selected Works in Three Volumes, Vol. 3. Progress, 1975, pp. 465–496. Lukács, Georg. Destruction of Reason. Merlin Press, 1980. Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. I. Translated by B. Fowkes. Penguin, 1977.

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———. Critique of the Gotha Programme. Marx-Engels Collected Works. Vol. 24. Progress, 1984, pp. 75–99. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6. International Publishers, 1976, pp. 477–519. “Microbes Maketh Man.” The Economist, 18–24 August 2012, p. 9. Montag, Warren. Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries. Verso, 1999. Mueller, Kristen, Caroline Ash, Elizabeth Pennisi, and Orla Smith. “The Gut Microbiota.” Introduction to Special Issue. Science, Volume 336 (8 June 2012), p. 1246. Nietzsche, Frederick. “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” The Portable Nietzsche, edited by Walter Kaufmann, Penguin Books, 1988, pp. 42–47. Orlie, Melissa A. “Impersonal Matter.” New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 116–136. Poe, Andrew. “Things-Beyond-Objects.” Review of New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Volume XIX, Issue 1 (2011), pp. 153– 164. Pollack, Andrew. “After Patent Ruling, Availability of Gene Tests Could Broaden.” New York Times, 13 June 2013. Web. 12 September 2013. Scannell, Kara, and Sudeep Reddy. “Greenspan Admits Errors to Hostile House Panel.” Wall Street Journal. WSJ.com, 24 October 2008. Web. 29 June 2013. Sharp, Hasana. Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization. University of Chicago Press, 2011. Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics. Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. I, edited and translated by Edwin Curley, Princeton University Press, 1985, pp. 408–617. Vattimo, Gianni, and Santiago Zabala. Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx. Columbia University Press, 2011. Vattimo, Gianni, Pier Aldo Rovatti, and Peter Carravetta, eds. Weak Thought. State University of New York Press, 2013. “Who Are We?” Editorial. Science, Volume 453, Issue 7195 (29 May 2008), p. 563.

CHAPTER 5

The Vibrating Pixel: Negri, Potentia and the Commonbeing of Biomaterialism

5.1

One

In Spinoza’s writings and above all in the Ethics, Antonio Negri, whose interpretations have had a great influence on contemporary theories of digital capitalism, finds a new “materialism” for a post-1968 world, “the period around 1968 (and up to the present), when the recovery of Spinoza’s thought made it possible to re-establish the idea of democracy and the common” (Spinoza Then and Now, vii). According to Negri, as he puts it in his fourth work on Spinoza, Spinoza Then and Now, “materialism, seen through the epistemological and ontological lens of Spinozism, was able to abandon its traditional foundation in dialectic and to embark on a project that was simultaneously constitutive and subjective. Thus Spinozism corresponds to a call for insurrection and to the new figure of class struggle that, from 1968 on, was no longer willing to squeeze through metaphysical straits towards teleological destinations” (vii–viii). As I have argued throughout Spinoza, New Materialism and the Contemporary, what is called by Left Spinozists (and the (new) new materialists they inspire and update) a pathway “beyond” “metaphysics” is a pathway into a new metaphysics.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature America, Inc. 2025 K. DeFazio, Spinoza, New Materialism and the Contemporary, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50232-2_5

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Spinoza’s “materialism” is a naturalism (in which God is distributed in all his creations), which is remade by the left as materialism of matter and affect and the creative force of “potentia”: a biomaterialism. Far from offering a radical (“insurrectionary”) challenge to capitalist relations, it normalizes the new forms of exploitation in cognitive capitalism. Negri’s interpretation of Spinoza is not just vital here but vitalist. Beginning with Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics (1981), Negri’s reading, which borders on a kind of religious fervor in Savage Anomaly, presents a new “constitutive ontology” in Spinoza’s Ethics through which to remake postindustrial capitalism. Production, of course, always takes place through specific historical relations. Through Spinoza, however, Negri re-makes production itself as ontology, so that to be is to produce, to be an active productive force in the world: “production as constitutive ontology.” “Spinoza,” he writes, “founds this possibility of philosophy, or rather of the destruction of philosophy, with absolute coherence. Constitutive ontology recognizes production within the structure of being. It is not possible to say being, except in terms of production” (Savage Anomaly 224). At the center of Negri’s reading of constitutive being is his treatment of Spinoza’s concept of “desire” which is a relay of “Appetite,” defined by Spinoza as when “striving” (conatus ) “is related to the Mind and Body together” (EIIIP9S, 500). “This Appetite, therefore,” Spinoza continues, is nothing but the very essence of man, from whose nature there necessarily follow those things that promote his preservation. And so man is determined to do those things. Between appetite and desire there is no difference, except that desire is generally related to men insofar as they are conscious of their appetites. So desire can be defined as appetite together with consciousness of the appetite. From all this, then, it is clear that we neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it. (IIIP9S, 500)

Spinoza here re-values value and re-situates desire and its objects outside of a religious framework, making it a philosophical advance. However, the material relations that determine both the objects and subjects of desire remain naturalized, in an early modern consumption-framed approach to desire. In Negri’s reading of the above passage and Part III of the Ethics (“On the Origin and Nature of the Affects”), however, “desire”

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(as “consciousness” of “striving,” of conatus ) becomes the “explanation” of “the essence of man in the dynamic order of reproduction and constitution” (Savage Anomaly 135). This is because, for Spinoza, “The idea of any thing that increases or diminishes, aids or restrains, our Body’s power of acting, increases or diminishes, aids or restrains, our Mind’s power of thinking” (IIIP11, 500), and the mind “strives to imagine those things that increase or aid the Body’s power of acting” (IIIP12, 502). According to Negri, Spinoza’s ontology reaches new radical, constitutive heights in the way it “synthesizes” “spontaneity” and “subjectivity” (Savage Anomaly 147). The “passage from conatus to the subject” (148) is one in which the spontaneous activity of the subject (which strives to increase its power) is constitutive being, which tends inevitably toward “freedom” and “sociality” (154). One of the outcomes of Negri’s reading of Spinoza’s constitutive ontology is that all activity (and especially activity that “increases” one’s “power”) becomes associated with “production.” Which is another way of saying that “life” itself is production, productive life. On this basis, Negri reads potentia (the power of the multitude as opposed to the Power of the state) as identical with productive activity: “Potentia” is “the force that actually produces [things]” (191). In other words, Negri’s reading of Spinoza becomes an instrument in his de-materializing of labor, the theoretical and class implications of which I examine in this chapter. Labor, in Negri, becomes life activity itself, the potentia of being, which is spontaneously resistant to and autonomous from capital and the state (power as potestas ). On these (biomaterialist) terms, labor and capital are refigured as an (ontological) conflict between the potentia of the multitude and the potestas of capital, which does not exploit labor but seeks to “capture” its power and from which the multitude can simply “exit” within capitalism on local terms— an argument he will develop to establish immaterial labor in cognitive capitalism as the new basis of capitalist relations. “In the final decades of the twentieth century,” Negri and Michael Hardt write in Multitude, “industrial labor lost its hegemony and in its stead emerged ‘immaterial labor,’ that is, labor that creates immaterial products, such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response. Conventional terms such as service work, intellectual labor and cognitive labor all refer to aspects of immaterial labor, but none of them captures its generality” (Multitude 108). For Negri and Hardt, the linguistic and the affective become a new materiality without materialism. But production and productive relations

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have not lost their “hegemony”—capital extracts surplus value at the point of production, which shifted to a large extent to the global south in the era of neoliberalism and remains the source of capital there as well as in the global north. Neither material labor nor what Negri calls immaterial labor are autonomous from capital. “The silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker” (Marx, Capital I 899). Negri’s “constitutive ontology” and its biomaterialism disappear capital’s economic compulsion over the worker. In such Spinozist interpretations of being the new forms of labor in cognitive capitalism are severed from the global relations of production, and the immaterial is made the new site of autonomous value production. Materialism, to say it again, is not the “matter” of objects or the “biomaterialism” of “life” itself. Materialism is a relation and the relation is always and ultimately a relation of production in a mode of production. Negri’s biomaterialism is a strategy for fashioning a new entrepreneurial “subjectivity” for contemporary capitalism. A subject, to be more specific, who regards the commodified forms of life in wage labor as the very ground of common being: “Mind you: ‘exchange value’ is a very dignified thing. It is a common reality; it is built and consolidated in such a way that it can no longer be related back to the world of pure exchange; […] There should therefore be no nostalgia for ‘use value’” (Spinoza Then and Now 135–136). This re-making of materialism without “nostalgia” for a world beyond capitalism is advanced increasingly on the left today in the name of a post-dualist common being, in which divisions between material and immaterial, human and nonhuman, base and superstructure, exchange value and use value, are dissolved and with them, consequently, the historical necessity of transforming the relations of exploitation that turn all use values into exchange values. Exchange, as Negri writes, is already “common” (135). “This is because the product of labour has become consolidated” (135). As I discuss in the pages that follow, common is a displacement of class and class relations. To say that the fact that products of labor are produced by common labor (e.g., the international division of labor) makes production and its products “common” is to depict the socialization of production that takes place under capitalism as the process of “communism” within capitalism, rather than precisely that which capitalist property relations restrict in their use of living labor for the sole purpose of accumulation of surplus value—precisely that, in other words, which makes necessary the overthrow of capitalist property relations. The

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effect of such readings as Negri’s is to authorize a new pragmatic (postMarxist) materialism that finds communism “always already everywhere” within capitalism. To use some words of another Left Spinozist, Alexandre Matheron, “we can also say that there is more or less communism everywhere that people, in their relations with others, comport themselves as ‘free human beings’ in Spinoza’s sense” (Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza 370). There is no freedom within capitalist relations except formal freedoms (democratic rights), which are all predicated on the economic unfreedom of the many. In this chapter I examine the new materialist readings of cognitive capitalism which have been deeply influenced by Negri’s Spinozist interpretations of the relation of labor and capital. I analyze the ways in which contemporary relations of cognitive capitalism are theorized in terms of a displacement of class and material labor, what I call the new “commonist” theory. The “pathway” that Negri finds in Spinoza out of materialism as determination by the mode of production is a “pathway” much cherished by the left, not because it frees the working class from the analytical “restrictions” of historical materialism that foreground the dialectics of transformation (as Negri claims) but because it frees the left from any lingering commitment to social emancipation. It is a pathway of class abandonment paved in radical idioms in which the freedom and productive force of (bourgeois) “singularites” are ontologized as commonbeing: being in which the relation of owners and workers is suspended.

5.2

Two

One of the dominant posthumanist narratives in the north Atlantic metropole today posits the continuation of the human species as contingent upon a series of disasters affecting the basis of life in common: climate change, biogenetic change, intellectual property and global inequality. Influenced by “common-ist” writers such as Negri and Hardt (Empire, Commonwealth), Alain Badiou (The Communist Hypothesis ), Slavoj Žižek (Trouble in Paradise: Communism at the End of History) and Jodi Dean (The Communist Horizon), the “common” has emerged on the transatlantic left as a way to make sense of the diverse crises that capitalism is producing but is unable to solve. In place of connecting contemporary crises to their underlying material causes, the commonist left champions “common” modes of life that, it is claimed, represent an “exodus” from capitalist relations. This is another way of saying that left commonist

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theory rejects the struggle to transform capitalism and suggests instead that the only option for those who seek to resist the heightening contradictions of capitalism is “exiting” or “subtraction” from class society into the immateriality of a fluid and indeterminate conception of life itself that accommodates living with others. The common in dominant left theory is associated with resisting the privatization of products of nature and culture (e.g., air, land, water, as well as knowledges, languages, information, affects) and negating the neoliberal market logic of calculation that reduces all life to the same. In other words, the common has become the sign for the affirmation of ethics: the ethical project of sharing carried out by the multitude, which, in the words of Hardt and Negri, “makes itself by composing in the common” its “singular subjectivities” and which engage in “practices of interaction, care, and cohabitation in a common world” (Commonwealth viii). According to commonist theory, humanity has reached the stage of production where its continuance as a species requires recognizing the biopolitics of its own being (the creativity of life itself) and ways in which the human has always been defined against its “others” (e.g., animals, machines, the inhuman and the nonhuman). What is necessary, as Stephen Healy puts it, is “[a]dmitting to the inescapability of our being-in-common” and “abandoning a homocentric conception of planetary well-being and learning to live in common with the biotic and abiotic forces that create conditions felicitous to life” (“Communism as a Mode of Life” 343; 345). The primary concern, on these terms, is affirming the sites within capitalism that, by producing being-in-common, purportedly negate its homogenizing and privatizing forces. For example, in their reading of J. M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K, a romantic anti-urban narrative based upon the philosophy that “a man must live so that he leaves no trace of his living” (Coetzee 99), Hardt and Negri represent the central character of Michael K as “a simple man” that “appears to be not of this world” (Empire 203). They find that his desire to “keep moving [...] in order to keep life in motion” against the backdrop of “cages, barriers, and checkpoints erected by authority,” is “the beginning of a liberatory politics” (Empire 204). His desire to retreat from modern life is, for them, emblematic of the figure of the multitude, a “fluid and amorphous” post-class grouping which is “shot through with lines of conflict and antagonism, but none that appear as fixed and eternal boundaries” (Empire 195). Against the forces of empire, the “decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that

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progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its expanding frontiers” (Empire xii), Hardt and Negri see in Michael K’s refusals to submit to authority a prophet of a new vitalism which will “construct a new mode of life and above all a new community” (Empire 204). In their writing, going off the grid (a consumerist solution to capitalist crisis that has itself spawned entire new industries) re-emerges as a form of radical activist biopower. Hardt and Negri’s call for a “real alternative” to the existing that is “enriched by the collective intelligence and love of the community” (Empire 204) is, like other readings of the “community-to-come,” premised upon the existence of “common” assemblages, practices and spaces which, it is claimed, resist the daily mechanisms of control that restrict the flows of contemporary life. In commonist theory, social inequality is a product of how disciplinary power has essentialized a master narrative about what it means to be human that has served to deny the humanity of other humans as well as the significance of nonhuman life and their treatment as “things” to be used. The solution to global inequality is, on these terms, to abolish humanist (“homocentric”) distinctions by realizing that with the advent of a global communications culture the means of social production are (already) held in common and are being used to produce a more fluid lifeworld in which all past distinctions, while not finally abolished, have become open to performative reversals, exodus and new assemblages of affinities. Common theory has significantly influenced the treatment of inequality as primarily inequality of “access” to the cultural common, as inclusion in or exclusion from the circuits of immaterial labor, informing autonomist Marxist theorists like Hardt and Negri, who focus on the cultural common, left thinkers like Dyer-Witheford who address cybercommunism, as well as free market libertarians like Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) and the 2009 winner of the Nobel prize for economics for her work on the commons, Elinor Ostrom (who is herself largely inspired by Friedrich Hayek). Commonist theory dissolves class consciousness in a biopolitical notion of community, valorizing local acts of commoning within capitalism that actually forestall social transformation. I argue instead for an alternative reading of the “common” that moves the term in another class direction, away from the accommodationism of the common as “community” and toward the common as communism (as in the Paris Commune). The commune, rooted in the collectivity of the working class, is as Marx wrote, “a lever for uprooting the economical foundation upon which rests the

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existence of classes, and therefore of class rule” (The Civil War in France 60–61). What makes the commune revolutionary is not an immaterial desire for escape, but the material collectivity of labor that takes hold of the means of production and, in the process, becomes the means by which to bring about the end of all forms of class exploitation. To put my critique another way, by submerging class in a posthumanist notion of community, common theory’s representation of capitalism as a regime of exclusion from the common obscures the root relations of inequality. Inequality is an effect of the deepening division of the world into those who own the means of production (factories, land, natural resources, technologies) and can therefore compel others to work for them to create profit, and those who, owning nothing but their labor power, are forced to work for the owners to survive. Common theory cuts off inequality from the exploitation of wage labor—from the social totality of capitalism—and focuses instead on the (“common”) relations of consumption that are viewed as undermining capitalist accumulation. Such arguments are popular because they make it impossible to understand the connection between deepening exploitation, deepening divisions along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, ability, religion and age, for instance, and more and more catastrophic environmental crises. The logic of inclusion and exclusion from the common does not explain but merely re-describes—with an ethical tone that puts shared feelings before critique-al concepts in cultural theory—inequality, which is the result of class. It is not lack of access to healthcare, for instance, that explains why millions of people die from treatable illnesses, while others enjoy boutique medicine; focusing on lack of access to or exclusion from healthcare begins with (unequal) distribution of products of consumption and ignores the exploitative relations within which products are produced. Inequalities in healthcare are the outcome of social arrangements in which owners of capital, in their perpetual quest to increase the rate of exploitation, transform the world’s workers into (property-less) wage laborers and turn ever more products of social need into exchange value. Starting with (unequal) consumption leads to the utopian conclusion that healthcare can be commonly shared by all members of society without abolishing wage labor, which is what determines not only access to healthcare but also the physical and mental stress that leads to the diseases affecting public health in the first place. As with other forms of liberal, left and Western Marxist discourses that focus on consumption, “Their concepts”

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as Ali Kadri argues, “are un-referred to the social production totality” (Accumulation of Waste 10). While much of the posthumanist turn to the common often draws from or aligns itself with the writings of Marx, it is worthwhile pointing out here that the “common” in Marx is not only a mode of co-habitation or state of being (which is only a concern with culture and the relations of reproduction). It is, above all, the result of cooperation of labor at the point of production. Although he discusses the emergence of “communist consciousness” as a result of the dominance of the world market and global capital accumulation in The German Ideology (58–60), for Marx the communist consciousness that results when the world market liberates individuals from their “various national and local barriers” by bringing them “into practical connection with the production (including intellectual production) of the whole world,” is the result of the “worldhistorical co-operation” (59) in production. Capitalist property relations bring workers together for the sole purpose of appropriating their surplus value, the dialectical result of which is that, the more global production becomes, leading to more “common” forms of culture (from the serialized novel and the diorama to film, Facebook, TikTok and….), the greater the exploitation of the collective worker and the deeper the working class sinks into poverty, the more the accumulation of social wealth grows in the hands of the few, thus producing “the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness” that arises “through the contemplation of the situation of this class [...] the majority of all members of society [...] which has to bear all the burdens of this society without enjoying its advantages” (German Ideology 60). On this basis, Marx reads the Paris Commune as a “glorious harbinger of a new society” (Civil War in France 81) because it demonstrated that “it was only the working class that could formulate by the word ‘Commune’ and initiate by the fighting Commune of Paris” the emancipation of the exploited population (“First Outline of The Civil War in France,” On the Paris Commune 152). The contradictions of the common under capital are in this way inextricably linked to the dialectic of capital and labor. Whereas commonist readings of the Paris Commune either reject the revolutionary working class organization of the Commune or treat it primarily in the cultural terms of biopower and affect that serve to glorify “spontaneous communism” within capitalism (Hardt and Negri, Empire,

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31), the commune represents in Marx the urgency of dialectical understanding of the wage labor-capital relation as a guide in the struggle for collective ownership of property. The interpretive debates over the Paris Commune, like the debates over the common, are significant as part of the broader conflicts on the left between reformist and revolutionary theory. Cutting off common forms of culture from class so as to celebrate the “spontaneous communism” that exists within capitalism, dominant commonist readings, in contrast to Marx, either reject the working class political organization of the Paris Commune or treat the Commune in largely affective and ontological terms. Hardt and Negri, for instance, suggest that, unlike the working class collectivity which established the Paris Commune, the fight over the common reflects the singularities and desires of the multitude, a fluid series of contingent groupings “in which there is no center, only an irreducible plurality of nodes in communication with each other” (Multitude 83). The contingency of the multitude means that future societies cannot assume the Paris Commune’s model of “the sovereignty of the people” since it inevitably leads to “the creation of political vanguards” (Multitude 69). The task of theory, on these terms, is to affirm the biopower and spontaneous acts of resistance of the multitude. In effect, from this commonist standpoint, it is not the commune but the common that makes Paris in 1871 significant: that is, the “flesh” of the multitude and what Rimbaud called its “swarm” intelligence models more emancipatory networks of resistance to capital’s capturing of the common (Multitude 91–93). The common, and commonist readings of the commune, are at the center of the increasingly influential “new communist” theory. Broadly speaking, new communist theory includes such writers as Badiou, Dean and Žižek; Negri and Hardt and other post-operaismo and autonomist Marxists; and the more recent “accelerationists” (e.g., Alex Williams, Nick Srnicek, Ray Brassier) among others. In their writings, the common emerges as the basis of a new form of communism immanent within capitalism and thus as the ground of a revolutionary politics. But, as Lenin argues, “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement” (What Is To Be Done? 25; emphasis added), and the deeper class significance of the new communism is that it represents the hijacking of revolutionary theory by a posthumanist theory of the common that is itself founded upon the primary assumptions of cognitive capitalism that privilege the petty bourgeois knowledge workers in

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contemporary capitalism and their new forms of consumption. Common theory is an apologetics of capitalism masquerading as radical theory now. Its solution to global inequality ultimately puts forward the consumer branding of identity as a purported self-creative commons whose line of flight “escapes” the negative dialectic of class.

5.3

Three

In general terms, discussions of the common today tend to take either a more romantic approach to the natural common (often the natural “commons” of water or air, for instance) or a cultural approach to the common that addresses the common produced within capitalism: for instance, open access software, new forms of digital culture and the fluid, decentered identities that have developed through social media. The most influential left theories of the common in the tradition of neo-, post- and autonomist Marxism—the new communists—focus on the ways capital mediates humans’ relation to nature, making the common not a natural essence prior to the social but one produced in and through the social. Thus Negri remarks, “We all know that the common is water, air, soil, the sea, land, etc. but we are interested in the human-made common, because the naturalist common has long been reabsorbed in the productive structures of capitalism” (“On Commonwealth”). His concern, like that of other autonomist Marxists, is “the common inside the multitude,” where “the common does not precede or follow the multitude: the making of the multitude is the common” (“On Commonwealth”). While there are of course immanent debates within this context (see Luisette’s response, which argues that “the natural outside of the political subject” is what is “missed” by “post-Marxist political thinking” on the common; 435), I argue that all ultimately posit the common as rooted in the cooperative knowledges and culture developed through technology, appealing to an anti-essentialist view of subjectivity produced in the common as a resistant, excessive and creative life force, “autonomous” from deeper-lying relations of production. The agent of the common, on these terms, is a posthumanist subject of biopolitics: a producer of creative, resistant life, a subject for whom the common is a post-class space of community resisting the dispositifs of power. New communist theory takes as its starting point the presupposition that class exploitation under capitalism has been superseded by what Paolo Virno calls “the communism of capital” (Grammar of the Multitude 110).

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This is based on the argument that capitalism is no longer organized around wage labor relations but power, and value no longer derives from material labor but knowledge, affect and communication (that is, immaterial labor). The exploitative property relations of capital, Virno suggests, have been replaced with a command economy of automation that eliminates wage labor, dematerializes the state and incorporates all prior forms of resistance within it by turning the source of value from the extraction of surplus value into the control of surplus desires through the multiplication of subjectivities, thereby “achieving” in negative form what past forms of communism had set out to accomplish. In other words, capital’s tendencies toward monopoly concentration are interpreted as organizing “for its own benefit precisely those material and cultural conditions which would guarantee a calm version of realism for the potential communist” (110). The new communists seek to distance themselves from the communism of capital and instead to focus on the forces of creative labor that they argue are the basis of a truly communist society. In its claim that knowledge is now the source of value today, the new communists repeat the mantras of cognitive capitalism, which, like its earlier iterations in writings of the proponents of “the knowledge economy” and “the network society,” is represented as a radically new “third type of capitalism” (Yann Moulier Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism 9) rooted in knowledge production: a “new historical and contemporary capitalism” “forged in Silicon Valley” (6). According to Moulier Boutang, who is associated with autonomist Marxism, with the development of computer and information technologies in the 1970s, capitalism has mutated from an economy based on industrial production to one in which, as he puts it, the “object of accumulation consists mainly of knowledge, which becomes the basic source of value” (57). Such claims about the role of immaterial labor have of course been central to the early work of Negri, who more recently with Hardt has been extremely influential in developing this theory into a notion of the common as the effect of knowledge produced through digital technologies. As they put it in Empire, today we participate in a more radical and profound commonality than has ever been experienced in the history of capitalism. The fact is that we participate in a productive world made up of communication and social networks, interactive services, and common languages. Our economic and social reality is defined less by the material objects that

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are made and consumed than by co-produced services and relationships. Producing increasingly means constructing cooperative and communicative commonalities. (302)

This is because, in Maurizio Lazzarato’s words, “Cooperation between minds, unlike cooperation in the Smithian and Marxian factory, produces public, collective or common goods: knowledge, language, science, culture, art, information, forms of life, relations with oneself, others and the world etc” (“From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life” 197). On these terms, to accumulate value, capital less and less exploits labor at the point of production; more and more, capital is forced to “capture” value that is created in the common that is produced outside of productive labor, not only in immaterial labor but particularly in the creative processes “outside” of work that involve social media and other kinds of collaborations. This is part of a broader reading which sees production of value taking place in society more generally: “work and life are no longer separate; society is collapsed into the logic and processes of capitalist development,” Negri and Guattari argue (Communists Like Us 22). “Society” in other words increasingly becomes “a giant factory” (Negri and Guattari, Communists Like Us 22), in which what is produced now is “subjectivity.” In the era of cognitive capitalism, Hardt and Negri write, the “core of biopolitical production [...] is not the production of objects for subjects, as commodity production is often understood, but the production of subjectivity itself” (Commonwealth x). The shift from “material” to “immaterial” production, as a result, involves biopolitical production, since “life is what infuses and dominates all production. In fact, the value of labor and production is determined deep in the viscera of life” (Empire 365). At stake here is the question of “value”: value rather than being a social relation based on class antagonism (exploitation) becomes an immaterial “thing” in itself that emerges spontaneously from the “bodies” of the (classless) “community.” There is thus an economic argument that posthumanist common theory is advancing under cover of a seemingly radical ontological claim about community life. Displacing the distinction between productive labor (which produces surplus value) and unproductive labor (which circulates surplus value and facilitates the realization of profit), life itself is rewritten as simultaneously “productive” (thus fundamentally “creative”) and “resistant” to capital’s effort to exploit, capture and even measure it. This is the case because, according to the new

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communists, the commoning of culture coincides with the “death” of the labor theory of value. Negri writes, “intellectual, immaterial, and affective production (which characterizes post-Fordist labor) reveals a surplus. An abstract temporality—that is to say, the temporal measure of labor—is incapable of understanding the creative energy of labor itself” (Negri, “The Labor of the Multitude” 20). Not only is the creative force of knowledge the new source of value, but it exceeds any capacity to calculate it. “Abstraction” is interpreted here not in economic terms, as the reduction of “the different kinds of labour embedded in the different kinds of commodity to their common quality of being human labour in general” (Capital I 142), but in terms of the (cultural) effects of economic abstraction: as rationalization and regulation that seeks to control life by homogenizing it. Abstraction is treated more as an effect of a way of thinking, not as a material process. It is not a coincidence that the defense of “immaterial labor” as the basis of creativity also involves the appeal to the “matter” of bodies (“viscera”) and affect: through the appeal to affect, biopolitics and life, the materialist analysis of the place of individuals, ideas and bodies in the social relations of production is displaced with matterism, the idealist concern with bodies and affects as self-generating and autonomous sites of resistance. This is, after all, one of the main lessons of Negri’s Left Spinozism. Through such lessons in displacement, which are often advanced in the “more materialist” name of the “matter” of the “concrete” as opposed to the abstract, society as an interconnected totality disappears, backgrounded by nuanced appeal to “differences,” which are given high philosophical (and increasingly “ontological”) significance as signs of the individual’s “singularity” within the “common.” Value, however, is determined not simply by the rational machine of capitalist calculation, much less by “life force” of bodies, as new communists suggest. Calculation is itself an effect of the economics of value. Value is determined by the labor time necessary to produce a product (the law of value). The law of value does not “die” with the emergence of immaterial labor; it continues on “behind the backs” of workers and determines their wages and the rate of profit. What is at stake in declaring the death of the labor theory of value is simply a transvaluation of value, or the desire “to change the principles of valuation, to change the way of conceptualising ‘the value of value’, as Nietzsche suggested in On the Genealogy of Morality over a century ago” (Lazzarato, “From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life” 203–204). By blurring the line

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between productive and unproductive labor and turning all labor (indeed all creative activity) into value-producing “life” subject to “regulation” and “control,” new communist theory obscures the exploitative roots of (“Fordist” and “post-Fordist”) capitalism in production. It also becomes the basis of rejecting as “abstract,” “fixed” and “essentialist” precisely those theorizations that seek to address the abstract material processes that structure social life beneath the “viscera” of the everyday. As for Virno and Lazzarato, for Hardt and Negri the automation of production and the transition of the global capitalist economy from the production of material goods to immaterial commodities of “ideas, information, images, knowledges, code, languages, social relationships, affects, and the like” (Hardt, “The Common” 349) are said to have dissolved property and, in turn, the material basis of class unity. In place of the working class whose existence is the objective consequence of having, in the words of Marx, freedom in a double sense, “that as a free individual he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that, on the other hand, he has no other commodity for sale, i.e., he is rid of them, he is free of all the objects needed for the realization [Verwirklichung ] of his labour-power” (Capital I 272–273), Hardt and Negri argue that the new figure of revolution is the “multitude.” Of course, as Antoine Aubert observes “It was from Spinoza that Negri drew the concept of ‘multitude’, which allowed him to progressively update Marxism by breaking out of the workerist framework and by expanding the revolutionary subject to include ‘all those who work under the rule of capital’” (“Post-’68 Intellectuals and Marx: A Fascination with ‘Farewells,’” 257). In his interpretation of Spinoza’s Political Treatise—where Spinoza writes that the governing of “public Affairs” in a “Democracy” is the “responsibility” “of a Council made up of the common multitude” (Political Treatise ii, 17, 514)—Negri writes that the “multitudo” is a “new quality of the subject” and “opens up to the sense of the multiplicity of subjects and to the constructive power that emanates from their dignity, understood as totality” (195). Spinoza’s theory of the bourgeois subject of democracy becomes a cross-class theory presented as post-class theory in Negri, one that is revolutionary precisely in its detachment from the division of labor. As Hardt and Negri write in Multitude, if “multitude is a class concept” (Multitude 103) at all, it is only as a contingent and elective affinity. The multitude is a post-class concept of class, not as a relation to the means of production, but as a contingent “deployment” or a “project”

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(104) whose ever-changing “conditions” exceed the “older” forms of working class political movements aimed at collective ownership of the means of production. Class as a relation to property, the familiar argument goes, is too “narrow” and does not take into account that “material” workers have been largely superseded by immaterial workers, nor does it address the very different life styles and consuming habits among laborers that speak to emergent forms of common sharing. The concept of the multitude aims to substitute a multiplicity of ‘singularities’ for what is represented as an ‘essentializing’ and ‘fixed’ notion of class “identity.” Singularity, as Anna Curcio and Ceren Özselçuk propose in their introduction to a special issue of Rethinking Marxism on the common, is neither “abstract sameness” nor “atomic difference” and “breaks with the very terms of the question of the part and the whole, a question that presumes unity even before posing the problem of the relation” (“Introduction: The Common and the Forms of the Commune” 309). The Marxist concept of working class as a relation (to the means of production) is an implied target here. A dialectical concept that addresses both the vast differences in kinds of labor and products of labor in which the proletariat is involved as well as the underlying relationships that connect workers beyond these differences, and that brings to light their common class interest in abolishing private property, “working class” in effect is represented as reducing all members of the working class to “abstract sameness.” Indeed, this is often the “totalizing” grounds upon which Marxism is rejected on the post-Marxist left: that is, for repeating what capitalism does to workers—reducing them to the “same”—when what needs to be affirmed, it is claimed, is their heterogeneity and autonomy. However, these arguments themselves simplify the concept of working class and are deeply influenced by the ideology of the individual. At the same time, to establish left opposition to capitalism, Curcio and Özselçuk also distance themselves from the notion of “individuality” (“atomic difference”), which of course is discredited not only as humanist but as overtly reflecting bourgeois class interests. Singularity thus becomes a fluid “third way” identity in the common. It is the contingent space of the “in between,” the “yes” and the “no” (Curcio and Özselçuk 308). Along similar lines, Hardt and Negri write that the common is “neither private nor public, neither capitalist nor socialist—and opens a new space for politics” (Commonwealth ix). But singularity merely “opposes” capitalism without negating capitalism. It opposes effects of capitalism at the level of ideas—i.e., atomic

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difference—while rejecting the analysis of and struggle against capitalism for which putting an end to private property relations is in the essential (historical) class interests of working people. Singularity, to put it more sharply, is the sign under which the dominant left “holds out” for the possibility that it may not be necessary to abolish the system of wage labor to bring about the equality they claim to champion. Within the post-property, post-class, framework of the multitude, the common becomes the ground of the new subjectivities that both disrupt older binaries of identity (e.g., self/other, worker/owner, mind/ body, human/animal, human/machine) and create excessive forms of life (potentia) resistant to the domination of the state and the appropriation of capital. To put this another way, the agent of production in the common is the posthumanist producer of common life which is always already social—it is a creative “force” that can’t be reduced to the (“humanist”) individual. From this standpoint, the individual’s labor is “beyond measure” because it is “entangled” in so many other kinds of labor that resist calculation. At the same time, “immaterial” is equated with the social and the fluid (actually the “spiritual” as I discuss below), and material with the outdated, the fixed and the isolated. The argument that global capital (still) directly exploits laborers at the point of production is in effect represented as a “humanist” nostalgia for the outmoded notion of the individual, material producer. The mathematics of measuring surplus value, consequently, disappears in the era of the excessive aesthetic cyborgian intelligence of the algorithm. The “widespread presence of algorithms in the daily life of digital culture,” Tiziana Terranova proposes, are not only part of a new digital automation that “unfolds in networks consisting of electronic and nervous connections so that users themselves are cast as quasiautomatic relays of a ceaseless information flow” (“Red Stack Attack!” 382; 383); they also have a “capacity to express not just ‘use value’ as Marx put it, but also aesthetic, existential, social and ethical values” (386). In actual fact, the development of knowledge workers and diverse forms of consumption in (industrial and postindustrial) capitalism have never signaled the end of capitalist private property relations but rather the increasingly global expansion of wage labor, within which the gap between exploited and exploiters ever widens. But such changes are the touchstones of cognitive capitalism, and they are used to declare new developments within capitalism as transformations of the very “identity” of capitalism itself. On these terms, the concept of the multitude “opens”

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class to a much wider range of new practices (such as open software and community gardening) that, it is argued, radically challenge capitalist relations and do away with the idea of a working class political party aimed at taking control of production as necessary for socialist transformation of capitalism. For common theory, communism is here and now. One of the reasons such common readings of capitalism have become so influential is that they turn contemporary ethical consumer branding into radical postcapitalist politics. The ethical subject sees themself as participating in ways of being with others that combat the privatizing forces of capitalism—whether through community organizations or credit unions or taking part in digital communities or “exodus” from the “grid” itself—even though all aspects of their life (including consumption) remain determined by the relations of wage labor. While these practices may resist certain forms of alienation, they in no way challenge capitalist relations of wage labor (which, for the ethical subject of common theory, are no longer central to capitalism anyway). Such practices instead foster “ethical capitalism” and are often easily accommodated and appropriated by capital. Uber, to take one example, was initially heralded as a radical new form of the “sharing economy,” creating a driving service outside of both private taxi services (monopolized by a few companies, and able to charge monopoly fares) and public transportation (run by the state and increasingly expensive) and situating its workers as “volunteers” who arrange to pick up passengers through its online network. Uber drivers use their own cars and create their own schedules and are rated by their passengers. But what is really at stake has always been unfettering the company from any obligations to workers—whether in the form of a regular wage, or worker’s insurance and protection on the job, which is increasingly difficult to hide, the more Uber has expanded. Workers not only have to have a car in the first place, but are not compensated for car repair costs, are liable for accidents and are not guaranteed work. The sharing economy is actually the austere corporate fantasy of the contract-less worker to whom the company is obligated to provide nothing, and whose customers in many ways determine which workers keep their job, which workers will be able to pay their rent. This of course is translated into a new form of consuming culture that breaks from traditional cultures of work. In its consumers, it fosters the notion that what they are participating in is a new kind of (digital) community in the city, that what they are paying for is outside the normal circuits of exchange. In actuality, it legitimates

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austerity and perpetuates the market ideology that members of society deserve only what a majority of consumers “like.” Jodi Dean has critiqued the way in which the dominant left in the last several decades has focused on “micropractices” that “depoliticized into lifestyle choices” economic alternatives to capitalism and ultimately “fetishize” “the local” (“The Party and Communist Solidarity” 332– 333). In opposition to the overwhelming left opposition to the very notion of a working class party, Dean makes an important argument for the need for building a working class party that is capable of helping people see the underlying class relations that connect them through their differences in jobs, life styles and consumption. However, in a sign of the seductiveness of the (class) discourse of the knowledge economy among left thinkers, Dean remains trapped within the very cognitive capitalist framework that informs the scholars and activists she critiques. For instance, Dean writes that the problem with Negri is that he didn’t fully identify contemporary capitalism’s “new forms of capture and subjection” (335). In other words, for Dean as well as for Negri and left theory more generally, capitalism is above all a regime of “control”: “Our mediated sociality affirms the structures of capitalist control more deeply and completely than the institutions of civil society ever did—especially under circumstances that amplify injunctions to individuality” (335). In positing the end of capitalist exploitation of labor through automation, theories of the “communism of capital”—which read the central conflict in capitalism today as the capturing of the common produced by the affects and immaterial labor—erase the material relations of social transformation. In effect, they put forward an idealist theory of the common that affirms the radical force of spontaneous, voluntarist feeling as the basis of change. And perhaps one of the most telling extensions of such arguments occurs in the proponents of “disaster communism,” who propose that “disaster communities” (e.g., the cooperative, non-state, non-market practices people spontaneously engage in when confronted with disasters) “give us ample reason to believe that local, emergent bricolage can efficiently meet human needs even under the most adverse conditions” (Out of the Woods, “Disaster Communism”). This is a sentiment shared by Naomi Klein, who writes, “there is no reason why future disasters cannot be laboratories for those who believe in reviving and reinventing the commons, and in ways that actively reduce the chances that we will all be battered by many more such devastating blows in the future” (This Changes Everything 352). Regardless of intentions, these

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arguments not only make a virtue out of disaster, but they obscure the relation of such communities to the austerity measures of capital—which are aimed at lowering the cost of production (of the laborer), forcing the laborer to cover with their wages more aspects of reproduction that were once funded by a part of the collective surplus value. Advocating such communities actually lets capital and the state off the hook, since the more “people themselves” are encouraged to help each other without the help of the state (by giving to charities, engaging in ethical sharing, etc.) and “outside” of the market (i.e., communism as “coping”), the less people come to demand higher wages or better social services, and the less likely they are to challenge the system that systematically leads to disaster conditions of life. Such arguments also feed the reactionary narratives that promote reduction of consumption among the working class as the answer to ecological crisis (itself a product, not of humanity, human reason or human consumption, but historical, and therefore changeable, class relations). This partly explains the appeal of such arguments to religious figures, like Pope Francis, who invited Klein to the Vatican to support his call for a more egalitarian, ecological capitalism. The issue here is that what is represented as “radical” and as supportive of “communism” is a way of updating capitalism (“posthumanizing” it) so as to forestall more radical change. Moreover, the same anti-state narratives deployed by left commonists are used on the right in a different idiom to justify the complete dismantling of state funding for disasters.

5.4

Four

Although, following autonomist Marxists like Negri, the departure for all new communist theory is the reading of Marx’s Grundrisse as a tutor text in cognitive capitalism, in fact, in both the Grundrisse and the first volume of Capital, Marx theorizes cooperation as a material force of production. Labor of course has always been a productive force, but its cooperative force is unleashed in capital’s social relations of production. “A greater number of labourers working together, at the same time, in one place…in order to produce the same sort of commodity under the mastership of one capitalist,” Marx writes, “constitutes, both historically and logically, the starting point of capital production” (Capital 384). This cooperative force produced by workers is not, as new communists like Negri claim, an “autonomous” force that exists outside of capital, but a direct result of workers’ status as property-less producers who, as such, are forced to

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work for capital to survive. “[T]he co-operation of the wage-laborers,” Marx emphasizes, “is entirely brought about by the capital that employs them” (Capital 385). This is because the “object of all development of the productiveness of labour, within the limits of capitalist production, is to shorten that part of the working day, during which the workman must labour for his own benefit, and by that very shortening, to lengthen the other part of the day, during which he is at liberty to work gratis for the capitalist” (Capital 384). Capital and labor exist in a contradictory relationship and the wealth of capital grows in proportion to the private appropriation of surplus value produced by the collective worker. As a result, no matter how global the socialization of production becomes, and no matter how much capital comes to rely on social knowledge in the production process, “the positing of social labour in the form of the contradiction of capital and wage labour—is the ultimate development of the value-relation and of production resting on value. Its presupposition is—and remains—the mass of direct labour time” (Grundrisse 282–283). This gives rise to the great struggles over the working day, as workers fight to limit—and eventually end—the theft of value by the capitalist and to transform the relations of private property. Contemporary theories of the common take the effects of the socialization of production under capitalism as a sign of a fundamental change in capitalism that severs the production of “common” products like language, knowledge, etc., from their material relation to exploitation in production. In doing so, commonist theories not only isolate knowledge from direct production, thereby erasing the implementation of knowledge always involved in manual labor. Just as significantly, in their effort to treat only “immaterial” labor as “creative” and to disconnect it from the exploitative relations of capitalism, digital products and services are represented as somehow independent of the very structures on which they depend. On this basis, “resistance” to capitalism is increasingly seen as a form of “exodus” from capital, not the class-conscious fight to transform it. But Marx’s point is that the expansion of capitalism that brings workers from all over the world together in the production process also shatters that cooperation by forcing workers to compete against each other and increasing their productivity through technology. Through introducing technology into the production process, capital continually assembles workers for the purpose of appropriating higher levels of surplus value. Bringing people together in common to work in and of itself, as a result, is not at all opposed to capital, as commonists suggest. This is

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really the “communism of capital” that the new communists claim to oppose. Revolutionary communism is committed to “the most radical rupture with traditional property relations” (Manifesto 504). The fact that workers around the world are continually brought together is, in other words, an effect of the ever-deepening contradiction between the forces of production, which lead to more and more global social cooperation, and the social relations of production, which limit cooperative production to the narrow relations of private property and thus become fetters to the productive process. The development of productive forces does not in itself constitute a new common society, but instead points to the necessity of abolishing the social relations of production that are founded on private ownership. Contrary to the theory of the multitude that “constitutes” being without “mediation”—a notion deeply influenced by Negri, who draws out of Spinoza a notion of the “productive force” of the multitude as “[f]reeing itself from the relations of production and showing itself as immediately constitutive” (Savage Anomaly 228)—production is always mediated by the relations of production. Revolution is not therefore “dislocation” (Negri) within the existing property relations. It involves workers not simply coming together to produce or consume commonly but coming to collectively understand their common class interest in abolishing the relations of exploitation and carrying it out. If early friends of capital represented capital as the spontaneous producer of surplus value (in the circuits of exchange), common theory produces a similar mystical effect in its representation of workers as producing value cut off from direct production (in the circuits of consumption and culture). Immaterial laborers are, it is argued, the new class that possesses a mystical “potential” outside of any property relations; it is now “pure subjectivity” (Endnotes, “Communization and Value-Form Theory”) that creates value. Such claims erase the roots of surplus value in exploitation of direct labor and lead therefore to the same ideological place as the defenders of the miraculous capitalists: to the claim that workers do not need to transform capitalism; rather, capital’s own (undialectical) immanent movements lead to its own transformation into a more equal society with the advent of the immaterial labor of the common. In the words of Mackay and Avanessian, “the only thing that will kill capitalism is its own ‘excess’” (15). Mackay and Avanessian draw their undialectical conclusion in their reading of Marx’s analysis of the organic composition of capital: the ratio of constant capital (capital invested in technology and the means

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of production) to variable capital (wages of labor). For Marx, as the role of technology expands in the process of production, capital has a tendency to invest less in labor relative to technology that increases the productivity of labor. And, since labor power is the basis of surplus value (profit), the less capital invests in variable capital (workers) and more in technology, the more capital’s tendency toward accumulation creates conditions for crisis: specifically, the falling rate of profit. Mackay and Avanessian, following Negri and the school of post-operaismo, translate this into a fantasy in which capitalism, no longer rooted in the direct exploitation of labor, will succumb to its own undoing without the need of any action of workers taken against exploitation. They write, “Since the ‘new foundation’ created by integrated machine industry is dependent not upon direct labour but upon the application of technique and knowledge, according to Marx it usurps capitalism’s primary foundation of production upon the extortion of surplus labour. Indeed, through it capital ‘works toward its own dissolution’” (39). Productive labor is no longer the basis of capitalism because labor is now socially and globally “mediated,” in turn leading to the production of “common” culture and knowledge that undoes capitalism from within. However, this is a telling misreading Marx. The “rationalization” of production by scientific means, for Marx, does not itself abolish the exploitation of labor. He actually argues the reverse, that exploitation “intensifies” the more productive labor becomes (Capital I, 1025– 1034)—and that those who fail to grasp this are prone to the “mystification implicit in the relations of capital as a whole” that attributes the productivity of labor to the “productive power of capital ” (1024). While the falling rate of profit leads to ever more global economic and social crises, there are countervailing tendencies that can counteract this (like massive destruction of existing stock, to re-start the recovery process). But, more importantly, it is only through the self-conscious organization of the working class against capital that capitalism can actually be transformed into a new mode of production. When Marx argues that, “As co-operators, as members of a working organism [the working class] are but special modes of existence of capital. Hence, the productive power developed by the labourer when working in co-operation, is the productive power of capital” (Capital 386), he in fact demonstrates the illusory nature of the idea that capitalism will die of its “own excess.” Under capitalism labor and capital exist in a

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contradictory relationship, no matter how “social” the forces of production become. Workers supply the labor power that capital brings together to exploit to greater extent. It is precisely because of this relationship that those who produce all of the social wealth in society do not share it but are rather controlled by it. Since cooperation in production is a relationship of exploitation, cooperation within the realm of culture in capitalism remains shaped by the economic relations of exploitation. Sharing products that have been produced through exploited labor does not undermine exploitative production. Capital in fact depends on workers’ sharing of products of consumption. Not only do the policies of austerity make such sharing outside of the market and the state increasingly necessary for workers to survive (which is why charities, churches, food pantries and the sharing economy have become so much a part of American life since the 2008 recession), but the role of the family unit in capitalism has always been a key site for reproducing the working class, allowing several people to survive together on low wages by sharing objects of consumption, a subject that is the focus of sustained materialist analysis in Julie Torrant’s The Material Family. Valorizing common consumption and culture as radical serves to hide the foundation of capitalist society and forestall the collective struggle for a truly free society. “Cognitive capitalism,” then, far from representing capital’s “selfdestruction” represents an increase of the rate of exploitation. The immaterial commons of social media have increased class inequality rather than abolished class and this is because labor is still socially required to make itself exploitable by capital: workers must acquire the technical and consciousness skills necessary for high-tech capital in order to survive and must do so at a level of technical development that is less labor intensive and so requires less workers. The social media commons is where the flexible labor force of cybercapitalism learns to cooperate in the borderless factory by imagining itself as above and beyond the class binaries of industrial capitalism and its crude class solidarities. In reality, and as is increasingly difficult to conceal, intellectual labor is increasingly subject to the same regimentation, calculation and exploitation that cognitive capitalist theory claims exists only in material production. As one article explains, A new generation of workplace technology is allowing white-collar jobs to be tracked, tweaked and managed in ways that were difficult even a few years ago. Employers of all types — old-line manufacturers, nonprofits,

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universities, digital start-ups and retailers — are using an increasingly wide range of tools to monitor workers’ efforts, help them focus, cheer them on and just make sure they show up on time. (Streitfeld, “Data-Crunching is Coming to Help your Boss Manage Your Time”)

Monitoring worker’s efforts, of course, is a euphemism not for control (which is how left theory translates such phenomena) but for making workers more productive—getting more from the value of the labor the owner paid for—and, therefore, increasing the rate of exploitation. This is ultimately what is at stake in the revelation about Amazon, which, as a 2015 New York Times exposé on the working conditions made clear, “is conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable” (Kantor and Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon”). Which is another way of saying that immaterial labor is increasingly proletarianized along the lines of material labor. Put differently, “Amazon is in the vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving”; “fluid but tough, with employees staying only a short time and employers demanding the maximum” (Kantor and Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon”). Instead of representing the “end” of capital’s former class relations of exploitation, fluid, contingent and flexible conditions of labor (e.g., Negri’s contingent class “projects”) are fundamental to contemporary capitalism’s regime of accumulation. The stark lines of class relentlessly reassert themselves. The ideological role of left theory is to bury them in the haze of heterogeneity. One of the central issues here is this: theorists for whom capitalism is cognitive capitalism constantly reference the “disappearance” of manual labor and manufacture (“material labor”) in contemporary capitalism, and they endlessly champion the role of knowledge in creating the world. But these same theorists conveniently ignore the role their own theories play in both making today’s material labor invisible and in fostering “differences” between immaterial and material wage laborers—the very differences produced in the labor process under capitalism and that get reified by bourgeois ideology into class-as-lifestyle politics or class as “symbolic capital” or class as classy in order to foment competition among workers, reduce wages and prevent any serious resistance to capital. The lack of resistance to capital (the death of the labor movement) is then referenced as “confirmation” that the working class is dead and a new

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class has emerged that needs to be “liberated” from the “fixed” binaries of the past. Commonists in other words ideologically sever the connections in the social and re-write them as a new posthumanist ontology of contingent commonbeing. So eager is the left to abandon the working class and its earlier political struggles to end exploitation that some, like Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen in Crisis to Insurrection, come close to celebrating the “ruined” state of the working class in spite of the vast devastation this has brought about worldwide: “it might not, however, be a drawback that the political forms of the Western working class are in ruins. We need to move elsewhere anyway. The 20th century is a testament to that” (8). The development of authoritarian and fascist movements throughout the global north in the twenty-first century has demonstrated just how disastrous that ruination of working class movements has been, just how willingly the left has cheered the ruination on.

5.5

Five

New communist theories, it is important to note, ignore the fact that “common” knowledge remains bound up in exploitation under capitalism, which divides workers between low- and high-tech sectors in the division of labor. In effect, the new communist privileging of knowledge ends up uncritically reinscribing these divisions, by first separating “knowledge” from labor—as if knowledge is not always involved in productive labor—and then privileging the sector of knowledge workers as the basis of all value today. Uncritically accepting the commodified forms of capitalist life, they regard workers as a separate class on the basis of what they produce, not on the basis of the relations of production, and their relation to the means of production. Rather than see intellectual workers as part of the same class as material workers, theories of cognitive capital oppose both big capital as well as the working class, which it sees itself as fundamentally different from. This self-distinguishing from material labor and the intense focus on singularities in the common are often represented as a sign of the common’s commitment to difference and heterogeneity. In actuality, such concerns are key elements of the petty bourgeois framework of the new communist theory. The petty bourgeois historically reflect the class interests of the small producers—whether small owners of land (peasants) or small (often family) businesses—those whose conditions of life and property capital are continually destroying, as capital’s tendency toward concentration

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and monopoly increase. The writings of the new communists and the theory of cognitive capitalism more generally reflect a new articulation of the petty bourgeois in the digital era of capitalism. As Teresa Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh argue in their critique of new communist theory, cognitive capitalism “in many ways is a re-appearance of the ‘putting-out’ system of labor, the regime of small producers” (408). New communist writings are, in other words, “the expression of the class interests of the new petty bourgeoisie—the intellectual workers—whose class interests are antagonistic not only to the proletariat but also to large-scale capitalism” (408). Such intellectual workers are often highly skilled and educated, own their own technology and contract their work out to larger companies. On the one hand, therefore, they have more freedom in their working conditions and a great deal more autonomy relative to wage laborers. Their work is “contingent” and especially “project”-oriented—precisely those qualities that are so privileged in new communists’ representation of the common. On the other hand, they lack security and are under constant threat of having their work further automated and taken over by either other petty bourgeois or wage laborers who can produce the same products cheaper. As small property owning producers, they oppose capital insofar as it threatens to ruin their small property or limit their own individual freedom to work autonomously and creatively on their own terms, but do not identify with the (property-less) proletariat and reject the struggle to abolish capital, since they benefit from the existing property relations, as precarious as their own position may be. They reflect, in this regard, what Rob Wilkie refers to as “a historical dead-end” (“A Machine of Affirmations: Fascism in the Age of Trump” 366). (In this sense too, the academic concern with the “precariat” is more a concern with the class status of the petty bourgeois knowledge workers, who are becoming increasingly proletarianized in austerity capitalism, than it is about the situation of the working class, the majority of whom have always lived precarious lives.) The new communists, in other words, universalize the particular freedoms of the petty bourgeois and translate these class interests into the theory of the common as the space of both of working together free from the instrumentalities of the market and the state as well as the space of singularities. For this reason, Ebert and Zavarzadeh continue,

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The opposition to capitalism in the revolutionary vocabularies that Negri, Žižek and other ‘new’ communists use to describe their antagonism to capitalism is only the opposition of the new petty bourgeoisie to big capitalism. It is not an opposition to capitalism. ‘New’ communism and its cognitive economics are reformist projects to secure a place for intellectual workers within existing capitalism and not to overthrow the system. (“Digital Metaphysics” 408)

Negri, in fact, has become quite explicit about the class interests he represents: “With all due respect to those who still comically believe that revolutionary possibilities must be linked to the revival of the working class of the twentieth century,” he writes, today “we are still dealing with a class, but a different one, and one endowed with a higher power. It is the class of cognitive labor. This is the class to liberate, this is the class that has to free itself” (Negri, “Some Reflections” 367–368). Negri’s arguments are of course revealing. He characterizes the class of immaterial laborers as fundamentally different from material workers—even invested with a “higher power” relative to them—because, he assumes, they alone are employed in jobs which require the use of knowledge and skill. This repeats the familiar representation of immaterial labor in cognitive capitalism and suggests that material workers, who work in direct production and many of whom work in the global South, are the class of the past. His interest in class “liberation” extends to a privileged sector of intellectual workers who benefit from capitalist property relations but desire a more ethical distribution of wealth. As another analysis of Negri and Hardt’s writing puts it, the left subjects for whom new communists like Negri write, “want a theory which explains their struggles, which are not struggles for bread and butter. Negri and Hardt fit the bill” (Aufheben, “Keep on Smiling”). The position of petty bourgeois knowledge workers between big capital and the proletariat, not surprisingly, leads them politically and philosophically to a whole range of “in betweenisms” that resist committing to either side in the class struggle between capital and labor, while remaining “open” to alliances with both. It is this which Lenin identified with the class “opportunism” that the working class struggle continually fought against in the period leading up to the 1917 Revolution. But of course new communist theorists situate themselves as exceeding such categories as working class, petty bourgeois and capitalist. As I have argued, they are quick to reject as “essentialist” the classical concepts of

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Marxism and the economic concepts necessary to understand exploitation. Yet, one of the important implications of such theories is that their “anti-essentialist” approach to class leads to a spiritualist theory of class and the common that actually reinstitutes the very binary logic it aims to avoid. This is the double-move of new communism. In the first move, for instance, theorists of the common like Gigi Roggero argue that “there is no idea of an original unity of labor that is then divided and alienated by capital and therefore in need of recomposition, nor is there a concept of consciousness that must be revealed to rejoin the class-in-itself with the class-for-itself” (“Five Theses” 364). Instead, the only space of biopolitical resistance to the “communism of capitalism” exists from within the rupturing of subjectivity itself, making transformation of the relations of wage labor unnecessary. Where do these anti-essentialist theories of labor and the common lead? Following the cultural studies dogma that class is “performative” rather than a relationship to the means of production, and thus that class cannot be reduced to an essentialist “identity,” new communists treat the common as spontaneously produced in the struggle for the common. “What is common, what can be described as unity,” Leon de Mattis insists in “What Is Communisation,” “stems from the struggle itself, not from our identity within capitalism.” And this is the case, “because no particular condition can any more identify itself with a general condition” (24). Precisely for this reason, the problem of earlier revolutionary politics is that “they comprehended communist revolution as the victory of a class over another class, not as the simultaneous disappearance of classes.” This led them to “the traditional idea of a transition period during which the proletariat, once victorious, assumes the management of society for an intermediate period” (Leon de Mattis, “What Is Communisation?” 23). This argument (which is ultimately an argument against socialism) is developed by others, like the writing group and journal Endnotes, to dematerialize labor itself. “On this [classical Marxist] view labour is something that exists quasi-naturalistically in the product, and exploitation is seen as an issue of the distribution of that product — thus the ‘solution’ to capitalism is seen as workers, via the state or other means, shifting that distribution in their favour” (“Communization and Value-Form Theory”). New communist theory, therefore, “calls into question any political conception based on the affirmation of the proletariat as producer of value” (“Communization and Value-Form Theory”), since this simply reinstates the very kind of “essentialist” approach to

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class that new communists seek to put under erasure. Having entirely erased the material conditions of class, labor and the common, and rejected as “quasi-naturalistic” the economic theorization of value as determined by labor time, “communism” becomes a utopian “event” in which all classes and contradictions are instantaneously destroyed: “we are now in a position to understand that communism can only be the simultaneous disappearance of social classes, not a triumph, even transitional, of one over another” (de Mattis, “What Is Communisation?” 24). Communisation is the “moment” of the immediate production of communism. By communism we mean a collective organisation that has got rid of all the mediations which, at present, serve society by linking individuals among them: money, the state, value, classes, etc. […] Communism will thus be the moment when individuals will link together directly, without their inter-individual relations being superimposed by categories to which everyone owes obedience. (de Mattis 26)

For the new communists, even such spiritual readings of communism as Jacques Camatte’s claim in Capital and Community that “communism is neither a mode of production, nor a society” (148, n.19) is too material. The new communists want nothing less than a communist rapture. The new communists’ resort to spiritualism is a symptom of what Lenin calls the “supernatural nonsense” that petty bourgeois communism continually produces in its substitution of left-wing “childishness” for scientific socialism (“Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder 563). Characterized, for instance, by a stubborn refusal “to understand the need for a strictly objective appraisal of the class forces and their alignment, before taking any political action” and a fetishizing of “individual” acts of resistance (560), the “petty-bourgeois revolutionism” (559) was ultimately one of the enemies of the working class movement in Russia prior to the revolution. Echoing the liberal populist rejection of working class leadership, it opposed the role of the Party and Party discipline in the struggle to expropriate the expropriators, which “is tantamount to completely disarming the proletariat in the interests of the bourgeoisie. It all adds up to that petty-bourgeois diffuseness and instability, that incapacity for sustained effort, unity and organized action, which, if encouraged, must inevitably destroy any proletarian revolutionary movement” (569).

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In this way, left commonism is the “infantile disorder” of the petty bourgeois in fear of their transfer into the proletariat by the dominance of monopoly finance capital. The petty bourgeois—who imagine their particular class interests as cultural workers as the source of true freedom—see in their dissolution by big capital and transfer into the proletariat the end of civilization as such. It is not a coincidence that the more capitalism seems to teeter on the brink of collapse, the more “disaster” becomes fetishized in left theory. What becomes in posthumanist theory the ontological condition of “life itself” is an effect of the ideological universalization of the class interests of the petty bourgeois and essentially their desire to be “delivered” from the material contradictions between wage labor and capital upon which their existence as a dependent class—as wage-workers who manage on behalf of capital—rests. On the other hand, the knowledge-created common of cognitive capitalism becomes equated with the (inherently) frictionless space that exceeds all boundaries: what Curcio and Ozselcuk call (in a Left Spinozist echo) a “substanceless substance” (308). The central premise of the common is that “what is shared is not a substance that is natural, fixable, or given, but one that is to be produced and re-produced and one that is open and multifarious. In fact, one can conceive of this as a ‘substanceless substance’” (Curcio and Ozselcuk, “Introduction: The Common and the Forms of the Commune” 308). The “immaterial” here is once again associated with the boundarylessness that comes from the fundamentally “common” nature of knowledge products created by the immaterial worker and their affect, languages, etc. In fact, so “substanceless” are knowledge and immaterial labor understood today by those theorizing the common that they take on spiritual characteristics that do away with all (material) conflicts and concepts: Spirit, like intellectual or immaterial labour, has a tendency to cross the borders; it is without spatial existence and does not reduce to its manifestations. In the era of immaterial labour and cooperation between minds it is not possible to think social conflicts in terms of the friend/enemy dichotomy or in terms of the conflict between two classes, nor in terms of liberal (private/public) or socialist (individual/collective) traditions. (Reed, “Seven Prescriptions” 534)

But while the common of immaterial labor is represented as a break from all binary thinking, it is itself actually inscribed in a whole series

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of binary relations. After all, the “immaterial” is equated with boundaryless fluidity, the “material” is associated with the “bounded” products of industrial capitalism. While the commonists claim (as always) to be “beyond” binaries, they institute a new set of binaries that reify the division between material and immaterial workers, the latter of whom are represented as the new revolutionary class. Industrial labor becomes the ground of “fixed capital” and “dead” labor, while postindustrial labor is embraced as variable and relative (constantly changing) space of “living” labor and vitality. The material worker whose labor is exploited in direct production is represented as a relic, whose struggles against capital represent a now “outdated” struggle, while the creative class is the “new” class of “liberation.” To say it again, new communism (and its new binaries) reflects the “higher” class interests of petty bourgeois knowledge workers today who, in the face of rapid proletarianization brought about by the falling rate of profit, identify not with the “revolutionary class [of the proletarians], the class that hold the future in its hands” (Manifesto 494), but with the bourgeois interests that seek to eternalize the (capitalist) present.

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Index

A abstraction, 52, 53, 73, 122, 131, 150 affect, 2, 7, 13, 16, 21, 26, 43, 72, 74, 85, 89, 90, 101, 142, 145, 150, 151, 155, 167 agency, viii, 2, 4, 5, 15, 31, 36, 40, 44, 49, 73, 74, 77, 83, 85, 90, 91, 102, 107, 108, 114, 115, 122, 126 Akselrod (Ortodoks), L I., 24, 27 Althusser, Louis, 2, 11, 21, 33, 41, 50, 108 Aristotle, 28, 47–50, 55 Aubert, Antoine, 41, 44, 151 B Badiou, Alain, 111, 141, 146 Barad, Karen, 5, 52, 54–56, 79 Bennett, Jane, viii, 1, 2, 14, 15, 27, 35, 36, 48, 51, 56, 57, 65, 71–74, 76, 77, 79, 80, 82–86, 89, 90, 103, 109, 113, 117, 123, 132 Bensusan, Hilan, 54, 55, 67 Bourdieu, Pierre, 15

Braidotti, Rosi, viii, 2, 16, 64, 65 C Caffentzis, George C., 6, 18, 19, 37–39 Callinicos, Alex, 56, 69 cause, 3, 13, 16, 28, 29, 33, 35, 47, 49–51, 55, 73, 92, 108, 120, 123, 131, 141 materialist causal relations, 123 self-causing, 29, 116 Cheah, Pheng, 105, 106, 108–110, 112, 125 class, vii, viii, 2, 5, 6, 12–14, 16, 18–20, 31, 41–44, 47–50, 53, 57–59, 62, 70, 71, 74, 81, 83, 84, 91, 102, 104, 116–118, 127, 131, 137, 140, 141, 143–147, 151–153, 155, 158, 160, 161, 164, 166, 168 commodity relations, 15, 53, 71, 76, 83, 128 common, viii, 6, 34, 39, 43, 86, 89, 117, 140, 142–144, 146, 147, 150, 153, 158, 165

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2025 K. DeFazio, Spinoza, New Materialism and the Contemporary, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50232-2

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174

INDEX

commonist theory, 142, 143 commune, 143–146 communism, 14, 41, 140, 141, 143, 146, 148, 155, 156, 158, 165, 166, 168 conatus (striving), 36, 37, 48, 62, 85, 87, 92, 139 Coole, Diane H., vii, 1, 12, 16, 24, 54, 103–106, 108, 111, 112, 115, 118, 122, 126 Cotter, Jennifer, 67 Curcio, Anna, 152, 167 Curley, Edwin, 23, 91

D Dean, Jodi, 141, 146, 155 DeLanda, Manuel, 51 Deleuze, Gilles, viii, 2, 4, 5, 12, 13, 16, 21, 23, 24, 27, 32, 33, 41, 49, 75, 90, 106 democracy, 6, 7, 12, 44, 151 Derrida, Jacques, viii, 19, 52, 69, 70, 109, 110, 125, 126 Descartes, René, 12, 18, 22, 26, 50, 72, 73, 122 desire, 8, 37, 43, 66, 89, 120, 138, 148, 167 dialectics, 31, 42, 43, 122, 141 Dutch Miracle, 18

E Ebert, Teresa, 73, 127, 163 Engels, Frederich, viii Engels, Frederick, 30, 31, 42, 43, 102, 120, 122 epistemology, vii, 51, 53, 76, 127 event, 5, 25, 36, 62, 82, 113, 166 expression, 1, 13, 24, 32, 33, 43, 61, 87, 105, 163

F Ferguson, Stephen C., 53, 76 Frost, Samantha, vii, 1, 12, 16, 56, 103, 105–108, 112, 115, 123

G Grosz, Elizabeth, 21, 22, 51

H Hardt, Michael, 12, 20, 42, 111, 141, 143, 145, 146, 151, 152, 164 Harman, Graham, 2, 5, 17, 55, 63, 110 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 2, 30, 31 Heidegger, Martin, 23, 47, 55, 62, 79 Hobbes, Thomas, 18, 39, 91, 92 humanism, 62, 64, 65, 67, 69, 118 Husserl, Edmund, 78, 82, 109

I immanence, 1, 7, 22, 44, 49, 74, 84 in-itself, 165 Israel, Jonathan, 6, 60

K Kadri, Ali, 80, 145 Kant, Immanuel, 63, 120, 123 Klein, Naomi, 123

L labor immaterial, 139, 140, 143, 148–150, 155, 158, 161, 164, 167 material, 140, 141, 148, 161, 162 productive, 66, 68, 83, 85, 119, 149, 162

INDEX

unproductive, 149, 151 Latour, Bruno, vii, viii, 2, 5, 36, 48, 52, 70, 78, 85, 92, 106 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 149–151 Left Spinozists, 5, 7, 14, 21, 24, 37, 42, 50, 103, 106, 167 Lenin, V.I., 119, 122, 146, 166 Lukács, Georg, 133 Luxemburg, Rosa, 59

M Marx, Karl, viii, 2–4, 8, 30, 39, 41, 44, 53, 58, 82, 103, 111, 126, 140, 151, 153, 159 materialism, 1–4, 13, 28, 44, 73, 74, 101–103, 109, 111, 118, 124, 140, 141 historical, 2, 30, 44, 65, 76, 108, 141 new materialism, vii, 7, 71, 111, 122, 132 Matheron, Alexandre, 12, 49, 141 matter, vii, 1–4, 17, 23, 24, 26, 29, 35, 48, 55, 58, 65, 71–75, 77, 79, 83, 85, 91, 106–108, 113, 116, 120, 121, 124, 126, 127, 131, 150 matterism, 2, 7, 150 Matysik, Tracie, 44 mediation, 15, 33, 42, 65, 87, 158, 166 Meillassoux, Quinten, 21, 54, 57, 63, 64 metaphysics, 1, 4, 12, 16, 18, 20, 28, 32, 37, 44, 47, 52, 58, 62, 72, 105, 137 microbiome, 127–130 Montag, Warren, 1, 2, 18, 75 Moulier-Boutang, Yann, 148 multitude, 6, 38, 43, 103, 139, 146, 147, 151, 152

175

N Nadler, Steven M., 40 nature, 5, 11, 16, 21, 22, 25, 26, 28, 34, 42, 49, 59, 66, 72, 75, 83, 84, 87, 99, 104, 105, 116, 122, 129, 131, 147, 167 Negri, Antonio, viii, 11, 13, 18, 20, 25, 42, 44, 111, 137–141, 147, 149–152, 156, 161, 164 neoliberalism, 5, 12, 15, 69, 140 Nietzsche, Frederick, 47, 60–62, 92, 114, 125, 150

O ontology flat, viii, 3, 12 object-oriented, 5, 7, 17, 55, 110 social, 47, 58 ungrounded, 47, 48, 63, 71 Özselçuk, Ceren, 152

P posthumanism, 65, 67, 70, 81, 131 potentia, 25, 43, 138, 139 potestas , 29, 139

R Roggero, Gigi, 165

S speculative realism, viii, 5, 58, 63 Spinoza, Baruch Ethics , 1, 20, 24, 40, 48, 85, 88, 138 Political Treatise, 6, 89, 91, 151 Theological-Political Treatise, 87 Srnicek, Nick, 146 substance, 1, 3, 5, 12, 13, 20–23, 27–29, 31, 32, 40, 49, 55, 72,

176

INDEX

74, 75, 84, 86, 87, 89, 105, 121, 127, 167 cause of itself, 28 self-relating, 28, 44 surplus value, 17, 26, 41, 50, 57, 67, 68, 117, 145, 153, 157, 159

T Terranova, Tiziana, 153 textuality, 48, 61, 69, 106, 110, 131 The left, 1, 2, 5–7, 14, 18, 19, 21, 28, 42, 44, 48, 74, 109, 140, 162, 164 totality, 3, 33, 35, 58, 69, 100, 104, 105, 108, 123, 151

U univocity, 13, 23, 34, 50, 75 V van der Heiden, Gert-Jan, 47, 55, 66, 67 Virno, Paolo, 14, 147, 148, 151 vitalism, 74, 106, 108, 143 W waste, 80–82, 117 Williams, Alex, 146 Z Zavarzadeh, Mas’ud, 73, 127, 163 Žižek, Slavoj, 141