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Matter that really matters?

“New” Materialism and “old” dialectical theory of society

Elmar Flatschart

Recent debates on „New Materialism“ (NM) demarcate a shifted trend after almost three

decades of a distinctively post-structuralist and ostensibly post-materialist “intellectual boom”

(Lorey et al. 2011). This by all means reflects a new awareness of certain shortcomings that are

to be found in the “subjective turn” of critical studies (Brand 2003, 801). It also appears as if the

renewed interest in matter was induced by a certain understanding that post-Nietzschian, “super-

idealist” (Bhaskar 1993, 375) approaches in many haven’t been able to thoroughly analyse the

depths of (social) ontology, as they lacked an explicit understanding of matter as pertaining to a

broader set of necessary assumptions in modern science (Coole/Frost 2010, 4ff). The endeavour

to vanquish overly reductionist older approaches is certainly to be welcomed, as is the search for

a renewed materialisms.

But if we look closer, NM’s hype can also be viewed critically. At least out of the perspec-

tive of “older” materialism, viz. scientific traditions, for which a critical realism has always been

an essential part of the toolkit, it appears as if certain novelties are only novel on the basis of the

given original vantage points, just as the seemingly innovative insights might be shown to actually

fall behind an already reached state-of-the-art.

Building on a critical-realist and in the field of critical theory of society also dialectical

outlook, this texts aims to both critically assess certain basic fallacies in NM and elaborate some

aspects of an alternative perspective on the social relations of and to nature.

In the first part, I will begin with a short assessment of what’s new in NM, reaching back

to important references that informed the new synthesis. The recapitulation eventually aims to

pinpoint certain grave limitations in the proposeed concept of materiality. This however shouldn’t

be understood as total dismissal of the relevant questions at hand – quite to the contrary, a renewed

interest in the relation between nature and society seems more than necessary, as I the discussed

example of gender relations shows.

Following this critical outset, I will try to decipher the reciprocal fallacies immanent in

NM, which can best be uncovered by means of a Critical Realist philosophy of science. This will

however still leave the problem of the social (ideological) conditions of NM’s fallacies unre-

solved. I will therefore try to roll up older, markedly Marxist approaches to a materialist notion

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of Naturverhältnisse, which stem from understandings developed by the Frankfurt School ap-

proach and there most notably the work of Alfred Schmidt.

I will conclude with a brief look to a “substantial” application of the abstract problems in

the concrete field of gender relations and their immanent theme of “difference”. Taking up themes

of a feminist reading of the “Dialectics of Enlightenment”, I will end with the suggestion to take

a closer look at the German debate on value-diremption [Wert-Abspaltung], which I hold to be

able to address many of the topical questions in the light of a broader framework of a theory of

society.

What is new about New Materialism? Situating the “Situated Knowledge”

If we are to look for the origins of NM, he have to turn to a broader shift of paradigms in

theories of science and scientific knowledge. During the last thirty years, studies on the nature

and working of science have gradually become both synthesized and pluralized in a genuine “dis-

cipline” of its own, science studies. But this program at the same time departs from formerly self-

evident or at least widely held truths like that of representationalism, the presupposition, that there

needs to be (determined and determinable) relation between a thing in itself and its representation

in mind (Brand 2003, 804). Facing the consequences of the newest technological developments

(e.g. cybernetics, informatics and particularly bio-engineering), what often was to become studies

in science and technology sought to combine aspects of ontology, epistemology and ethics in a

social-science perspective, which introduced a peculiar form of agency in these hitherto “objec-

tivist” field. This move certainly cannot be understood without one of its most famous thinkers,

Bruno Latour. In his seminal book “Laboratory Life: the Social Construction of Scientific Facts”

(Latour 1979) he argued for a social-constructivist perspective on science as practices. This is

however no new theme, it in many ways continues a (distinctively French) train of thoughts that

can be traced to the early 20th century philosopher Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard’s Épistémologie

sought to dynamize reflections upon science in accordance to the then changing nature of scien-

tific progress. In it, he saw a specific form of esprit scientifique, scientific rationality, at work,

which unfolded through a rapturous, yet progressive movement. He encompassed a peculiar form

of “open materialism”: taking up the old dualism of matter and spirit (or empiricism and rational-

ism), this materialism was meant to overcome both a “realist” and “idealist” perspective in a “psy-

choanalysis of knowledge production”, which anticipates much of what later became known as

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“discourse analysis”1. This was marked by the idea that it is Épistémologie’s paramount task to

overcome certain epistemic obstacles, of which the most prominent are the “objectivist”

(Bachelard 2002, 105) and “substancialist” (Bachelard 2002, 105) ones. For Bachelard it was

evident, that reality wasn’t something substantially existing, but only material through “theoretical

thought, a stage of discursive thought, a result that has been prepared” (Bachelard 2002, 108).

Reality was “produced rather than induced” (Bachelard 2002, 108), which consequently led to the

view that science should be less concerned with the objectivity of objects than with their subjec-

tivity proper:

“We have only to speak of an object to think that we are objective. But, because we chose

it in the first place, the object reveals more about us than we do about it. What we have to consider

to be our fundamental ideas concerning the world are often indication of immaturity of ouf minds.

[…] In point of fact, scientific objectivity is possible only if one has broken first with the immediate

object […]. Far from marvelling at the object, objective thought must treat it ironically.”

(Bachelard 1984, 1)

We hence face the somewhat paradoxical situation of an “objectivity without object” or a

materialism that is interested in materiality only insofar as thinking about it already takes back the

fixity of any kind of naturalness attributed to it. Bachelard’s materialism is one that is entirely

encompassed in an anthropocentric dimension, just at is grounds its ponderings on the relation of

matter and mind in theory or discourse. This is especially relevant, as his intention – just like the

one of many “French” thinkers of (post-)structuralism – was to overcome all reductionism per-

taining to a “pre-scientific” embeddedness in the world of “immediate experiences” in order to

point to a concept of “abstract thought” (Bachelard 2002, 18), which in itself was held to have a

proper solidity of some kind.

Latours later fusion of object and subject in his “actor-network-theory” is but a warming-

up of these original themes, found within the Bachelardian tradition. What he did achieve, unlike

many other philosophers of science (including Bachelard, cf. (Latour 1979, 258), was a popular-

ized and sociologically grounded reframing.

*

A similar motive can be found with Henri Bergson, who also was astonished by the revo-

lutionary developments of early 20th century physics and “exact sciences” (Bergson 1948, 9). For

him, the ominous solidity of “abstract scientific thought”, which Bachelard posited as a rather

1 It is only consequential that Michel Foucault, just as his mentor Louis Althusser drew heavily on Gaston

Bachelard. Unfortunately, such lineages are often blurred due to insufficient citations and a practice of “hiding the

intellectual debts”.

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contingent mediation between “subjectivist” and “objectivist” poles, was to be found in an imme-

diateness not akin to abstraction, but to human intuition. But though it might at first appear that

this demarcates a stark contrast, the two positions eventually correlated in their attempt to criticise

both (Humean) empiricism and (Kantian) idealism, i.e. the major metaphysical tenets of their

times. Bergson sought to achieve this mediation in terms of an “empathising contact with things”,

which was deemed to produce some sort of immediate access to them, overcoming the proceeding

disputes (Bergson 2002a, 250) over metaphysics.

“Suppose that we were to insert our will into it, and that this will, expanding, were to

expand our vision of things. We should obtain this time a philosophy where nothing in the data of

the senses or consciousness would be sacrificed: no quality, no aspect of the real would be sub-

stituted for the rest ostensibly to explain it. But above all we should have a philosophy to which

one could not oppose others, for it would have left nothing outside of itself that other doctrines

could pick up; it would have taken everything.” (Bergson 2002a, 251)

With Bergson, we should embrace a vision of things that immediately fuses their materi-

ality to our interaction with them. The focus is clearly drawn away from the questions of materi-

ality-as-existence to the process-dimension of constituting and apprehending materials. Both are

held to be closely tied, as the view is shifted from a passive, dualist position to a notion of per-

ception as “auxiliary of action”, which “isolates the part of reality as a whole that interests us

[my emph.]” and hence “shows us less the things themselves than the use we can make of them[my

emph.]” (Bergson 2002a, 253). Bergsons rejection of any kind of static thinking introduces a new

fluditiy into philosophy that is emerging from a spatio-temporal ontology, which seeks to abandon

the “old” Cartesian and Kantian separation of space and time. While before him, almost all of

theories of temporality were somehow building on a separation of space and time in which the

former was attributed objectivity, while the latter was tentatively associated with subjectivity2,

Bergson seeks to break with this in his philosophical concept of intuition, which “fuses” mind and

matter in a trajectory of space-time derived inter alia from Einsteinian physics. It advances the

thesis that our conception of time as something consisting of a succession of moments is equally

flawed as reducing space to relations. It instead argues for a “pure duration”, which represents

change in itself.

2 Most notably is Kant’s opinion on the relation of time and space, who – though idealistically positing

both qualities as a priori “mental” – argued that space is “the condition of the possibility of phenomena” and

“serves for the foundation of all external intuitions” (Kant 1855, 24), while time is “the immediate condition of all

internal” and “merely a subjective condition of our (human) intuition”(Kant 1855, 31). This transcendental-idealist

conceptualisation presents a typical version of the external/internal-, object/subject-divide peculiar to the space-

time-dualism.

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“In a word, pure duration might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes,

which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines, without any tendency to ex-

ternalise themselves in relation to one another, without any affiliation with number: it would be

pure heterogeneity.” (Bergson 2002c, 61)

Without much trouble, we can affirm that the advanced view is all but easy and rather

strange to customary analytical thought. That’s why Bertrand Russell in his eminent “History of

Western Philosophy” judged that to a “large part […], probably the part to which most of its

popularity is dues, [it] does not depend upon argument, and cannot be upset by argument” (Russell

2000, 764). It is a picturesque way of speaking about something, while the definition of “speak-

ing” remains vague insofar its implicit rule – that it only make sense, if signifier and signified

have some kind of intelligible formal relation – is broken.

The serious doubt concerning this last epistemological breach will however be familiar to

most, as it resembles a prominent position of all those who – following Saussures “synchronic

theory of language” (De Saussure et al. 2001, 81ff) – cling to the performative character of all

(uttered) truth. It is therefore no surprise that we find a direct link between Bergsonianism and

essentials of post-structuralist currents. Most prominent is certainly Gilles Deleuze’s appraisal,

which highlights the “multiplicity” (Deleuze 2001, 63) in terms of relations and the “virtual co-

exsistence with itself” (Deleuze 2001, 80) in terms of (intra-psychic) duration. This fits into the

scheme of a philosopher, who was obsessed with difference and went so far to even cast off its

connection to the classical dualisms, arguing for it being a “third term”, a radical “ontological

ground that prefigures and makes possible relations between subjects, and between subjects and

objects” (Grosz 2005a, 5). Deleuze, in turn, can be conceived as one of the core references for

NM.

So, the circle closes, if we trace back the two perhaps most distinctive resources of NM –

Latour and Deleuze – to their original early-20th-century-origins, which in many ways were a lot

clearer cut in their thesis. If we follow this line, NM isn’t new in itself, but in fact nothing but a

blending of two main arguments.

(1) Science is “materialist” exactly when it is most “subjectivist” in its construction of the

object “matter”.

(2) The object “Matter” is most material when the concepts used are least substantial, so

as to merge the subjective account with it.

This evidently harbours the ontological argument that what is material is not real as in

referring to, “representing” some-thing (De Landa 2006, 56), and the epistemological argument

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that materialism is essentially materialist when it is most semiotic, “transversal” and arbitrary

in its approach (Dolphijn/van der Tuin 2012a, 109).

*

This motive can now be related to a “substantial” example in the cultural studies that gave

rise to NM, (post-structuralist) gender theories. This apparently more “applied” source not only

shares common predecessors with the science-studies’ heritage, it converges in its major theme

with a core problematic of NM – difference. At least since Beauvoir’s famous dialectical take

on gender difference (Beauvoir 1956, 90), the problem of being the other or “othering” has

preoccupied feminist theory and political praxis. In post-feminism and here most palpably its

undisputed forerunner Judith Butler, the theme of difference was radically transposed by view-

ing it through the glasses of (semiotic) constructivism. In this, gender itself becomes destabi-

lized by affirming that it can be reduced to “linguistic, and/or cultural difference” (Butler 1999,

13). This frontal attack on “metaphysics of substance”, which Butler (Butler 1999, 25), follow-

ing her mentor Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of all “metaphysics of presence” (e.g. Derrida

1998, 236), launched against any notion of sexual difference as related to bodily features fol-

lowing a “heterosexist” matrix, brought her in trouble with many feminists, who affirmed the

central role of bodies and embodiment. These critical voices came from the pre-constructivist

traditions, but also from post-structuralists referring e.g. to Luce Irigaray’s “subversive” ap-

proach to sexual difference (cf. Irigaray 1985, 76). In her follow-up book “Bodies that matter”,

which can partly be read as a reaction to her critics (Butler 1993, 27f), she actively approached

the issue of bodily materiality, but didn’t really abandon the “anti-foundationalist”, semiotic

and essentially performative take:

“We may seek to return to matter as prior to discourse to ground our claims about sexual

difference only to discover that matter is fully sedimented with discourse on sex and sexuality

that prefigure and constrain the uses to which that term can be put. […] Indeed, if it can be

shown that in its constitutive history this “irreducible” materiality is constructed through a

problematic gendered matrix, then the discursive practice by which matter is rendered irreduc-

ible simultaneously ontologizes and fixes that gendered matrix in its place.” (Butler 1993, 29)

Although Butler at the same time acknowledges that, “to deconstruct matter is not to ne-

gate or do away with the usefulness of the term” (Butler 1993, 30), it is quite clear that this

approach’s association with matter is somewhat negatively connoted, aligning it with a per-

formative power-discourse, which fosters phallogocentrism. It is equally pellucid that positions

wanting to reframe materiality in a more autonomous and “positive” way, wouldn’t be happy

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with Butler’s deconstructive account, which after all remains “exterior” to material nature, un-

able to grasp the “within of nature” (Dolphijn/van der Tuin 2012a, 108). The discontent with a

substantial lack of materiality, which e.g. manifests in the impossibility to relate “women*” and

“nature” in a positive way (Dolphijn/van der Tuin 2012b, 87), is held to be concerning more

than just political problems. It is interpreted in the general philosophical opposition between a

framework that – however deconstructionist – ultimately sticks to the problematic of a dualism

between subject and object and a position that – following Bergson – casts aside the very prob-

lematic in itself, arguing for a “free floating” and “intuitively-related” process-“ontology”.

“My claim, by contrast, is that if becoming, difference, and iteration are what make the

self-identity of the subject and culture impossible, so too, they immensely complicate and render

self-identity problematic in the arena of nature, and materiality, as well. The biological, the

natural, and the material remain active and crucial political ingredients precisely because they

too, and not culture alone, are continually subjected to transformation, to becoming, to unfold-

ing over time.” (Grosz 2005b, 78f)

While it is clear that this claim is attacking the Hegelian residues in not only Butler, but

much of French (feminist) philosophy, which is building on the theme of the “Other” and “dif-

ference”(Braidotti 2012, 33; Grosz 2005b, 46 ), it is less obvious where this leads us, especially

in terms of a feminist stance. It seems hard to actually make sense of a “nomadic body” that is

a “threshold of transformation” and draws upon a “situated, postmodern, culturally differenti-

ated understanding of the subject in general and of the feminist subject in particular” which

certainly “can also be described as postmodern/postindustrial/postcolonial, depending on one’s

location” (Braidotti 2012, 34). In fact, one might be tempted to ask for a little more “substantial”

basis behind this grand terminology.

One may even go further and ask – can we do without the theme of difference, a distinction

of subject and object? And does NM maybe not overcome linguisticism’s limitations, but actu-

ally improve it for the worse in taking the material to a new level of ambiguity? In the next

chapter, I shall argue for a rather fundamental critique of NM’s basic assumptions and in this,

for a return to critically “foundationalist” materialist approaches.

The inexorability of materialism – NM and a critical realist, dialectical perspec-

tive

Starting with the sceptical conclusions of last chapter’s end, it certainly is necessary to

elaborate the key problems in a more exhaustive explanatory critique. I would suggest that this

can be done on three levels, an ontological, epistemological and theory-of-society oriented one.

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These levels, admittedly, already presuppose a basic outlook somewhat opposed to that of New

Materialism. Owing to the Münchhausen-Trilemma (Albert 1991, 15), there’s no way to scientif-

ically establish a fundament’s own fundaments; yet I will try to substantiate my own positions’

basic assumptions by means of arguments that resemble a “Achilles heel critique” (Bhaskar 1993,

396), i.e. starting with an opposed approaches’ apparently solidest point and exposing it as fallible.

On an ontological level, the strongest claim NM makes (against both “old” materialism,

but especially against “linguisticism”) is its entanglement with matter, i.e. nature and an “anti-

anthropocentric” perspective. It is argued that we have to take for granted “the existence of a

material world that is independent of our minds” (DeLanda 2012, 39). Certainly, this evokes the

“old” problem of how to explain what “mind” is and how it is explainable that it is “mind” that

gives identity to matter. With NM, this leads to the rather straightforward solution that “all objec-

tive entities are products of a historical process, that is, their identity is synthesized or produced

as part of cosmological, geological, biological or social history” (DeLanda 2012, 39). Now, apart

from this fairly short way from “being in nature” to “producing nature”, the very sort of ontolog-

ical claim harbours serious problems. By reducing being to the identity we give to it, it is produc-

ing the “epistemic fallacy” (Bhaskar 2008, 36), the reduction of being to our knowledge about it.

In this, NM is from the first point anthropocentric, as it factually can’t imagine an ontology, hence

material nature, without human beings. This, however, is the core essence not only of realism, but

of any kind of ontological thinking. Talking about reality implies that human social activity (i.e.

“identity giving”) is just one part of it and that it has in the past and most probably will in the

future not be so. This logically necessitates a “critical naturalism”, a stratified and emergent view

on reality that essentially reflects what kind of object human society is (Bhaskar 2008, 36) and

how it is situated in a wider sense of (natural) objectivity. Such a critical realist view on ontology

doesn’t forsake epistemic relativism (i.e. the acceptance of the principle fallibility of our

knowledge) and doesn’t reduce all material to natural materiality but it makes substantial distinc-

tions on the basis of the pre-existence of natural reality. Against NM’s (Bachelardian) reduction

of materiality to our view about the material, it has therefore to be upheld that without some kind

of substance, without foundational thought, the concept of “matter” in itself would make no sense

at all. Matter is not emerging out of our minds, but our concepts of matter are emerging out of real

materiality, essentially outside of us. If reference to the concept is not meant to remain merely

rhetorically, we therefore have to abandon ontological anthropocentrism of any kind, which can

only be done, if the definition of ontology does in no way reduce itself to the either (a.) something

social or (b.) the pure (social) act of defining the real. It is the relation between the two, an ominous

“difference” between both, which had intrigued post-structuralist French thought, and, as it seems,

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still haunts NM, in Gilles Deleuze’ specter. The problem indeed deserves treatment in the field of

epistemology, but this already presupposes the separation of ontology and epistemology and

hence not only a dualist perspective on science, but also an acceptance of the priority of ontology,

the domain of being (over difference in being). NM on the other side claims to highlight matter,

but cannot – by its very principles – have a meaningful concept of it as its use of matter as “being”

remains utterly rhetorical. It is this rhetorical, “performative” use of matter that sets it apart from

e.g. ordinary post-structuralism. But without any substance to it, the use’s effects are bound to

either remain rhetorical themselves, or illicitly subsume material problematics under a “material-

discursive” (Barad 2003, 810) hegemony.

This leads to the second field of investigation, epistemology. In this we have to ask where

to locate a unique feature of NM. As I’ve tried to show, there isn’t much unique in NM, but it is

rather the new guise that is selling the product. Originally, post-sturcturalist deconstruction fo-

cused on the pure différance, the hiatus between the epistemological and the ontological itself

(Derrida 2004b, 164) and formed a kind of negative position without a positive relata. In this, the

question of epistemology was shifted from “why?” to “how?”, essentially trying to reduce ontol-

ogy to negative epistemic questions on our performance of knowledge. The most appropriate ve-

hicle for this endeavour was linguisticism and a rather harsh turn away from much of “logocen-

tric”, presence-oriented western philosophy and the science it informed (Derrida 2004a, 41). NM

is rowing back from this extreme position insofar it seems to be open to (natural) science

(Coole/Frost 2010, 9), in fact frequently refers to changes and progresses in science, e.g. biotech

and quantum physics (Coole/Frost 2010, 11ff). It isn’t up to me to judge the authors’ knowledge

in these fields, but I feel able to assess the underlying general epistemological assumptions. In

this, the advocacy for what feels like a plea for a new scientific revolution is as hollow as the

concept of materiality. The anti-scientific “culturalism” of much of post-structuralism is ex-

changed for a (Bergsonian) concept of intuition and oneness, which is best summarized by its not

being anything particular. It resists all forms of systematization in order to come closest to a “real

process”, that is at the same time “material” and “mental”. Taken to its end, this view would render

methodological exploration equally redundant as it would abandon any concept of truth. The mon-

ism of a “plane of immanence” (Deleuze/Guattari 2005), which Deleuze claimed to assign to all

being, turns out to be on par with the contingent character of a mode of thinking, that deems clear

cut methodical organisation (of thought) superfluous. Following Critical Realism, this can be de-

ciphered as an “ontic fallacy”, the "compulsive determination of our knowledge of being by being

itself"(Bhaskar 1994, 45), which has as its basis a “desocialisation of science” (Bhaskar 2009,

253), i.e. the reductionist simplification of the social character of epistemic problems up to their

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dissolution in an actualist inversion of subject and object, which dogmatically reinforces the own

position, that ultimately can, just like in post-structuralism, be reduced to the – itself contingent –

talk of contingency.

Now, uncovering these two paralleling fallacies may be of some interest, but it isn’t until

we explain them in an ideology-critique-like mode of societal contextualisation that we can really

make sense of their internal yoking and efficacy. We therefore have to turn to the field of theories

of society and therefore to the real historical character that permeates both abstract ontological

and epistemological questions. Only this step can provide a synthesising frame that may ultimately

enable us to not only make sense of NM’s own material historical origins, but also help us to

illuminate some of the problems it arose to answer in the first place.

This also implies a consideration concerning the very distinction of ontology and episte-

mology, or otherwise framed – subject and object. Much of NM would probably go with Karen

Barad in affirming that the very distinction of epistemology and ontology, “the Cartesian subject-

object distinction” (Barad 2007, 130) has to be abandoned in order to explore the real “intra-

actions” of matter (Barad 2007, 97ff), which to NM really matter. It is after all this synthesis that

distinguishes “agential realism” from other discursive approaches like Judith Bulter’s, for which

matter is only passive, as opposed to being an active “agent”(Barad 2007, 151).

I would suggest that both problems, the very basic fallacies and NM’s unconventional

“material-discursive” conflation of external and internal problematics, can actually (only) be ex-

plained jointly in a critique of the presupposed foundational meanings of “social” (society) and

“matter” (nature). This certainly implies looking for an (ideology-critical) real foundation of NM,

which – according to its own maxims – mustn’t be feasible. The here proposed – probably “old”

– notion of materialism would however see exactly this as its own key legitimation: uncovering

the mechanisms and forces, which actually make things work the way they do. This already im-

plies that we have to separate between our immediate speaking of these mechanisms and their

existence (anti-actualism, ontological depth). But this, on the other hand, doesn’t completely re-

solve the problem of the relationality between both: in order to make sense of the dualism, we at

the same time have to already presuppose it being related (in order to avoid absolute contingency,

which e.g. post-structuralism effectively endorses). The real question is thus how to situate and

explain the factor relation in itself, both in NM and in an opposing view that seeks to uncover its

ideological nature and simultaneously has to provide its own self-legitimation.

The probably the most eminent attempt to grasp relationality proper is to be found in the

(modern) dialectical tradition, which, since Hegel, attempted to overcome simple dualistic think-

ing so to mediate subject and object. Just like NM, its aim is to bring together subject and object;

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but unlike NM, it does accept that in order to do so, both first have to be accepted in their relative

separation. The mediation cannot be presupposed and externalised, but has to be actively com-

pounded, both in theory and practice. This claim has grave effects for a critical materialist dia-

lectic, which, unlike NM, sticks to the primacy of human efficacy in social science and thus (un-

like orthodox Engelsian “DIAMAT”, and following its critique by Georg Lukács (Lukács 1967,

240)) situates itself in a particular historical social formation, which is in the last instance embed-

ded in nature, understood as the non-anthropomorphic precondition of society. What then how-

ever matters is the social relations and their historic transformation and hence the way the relation

between subject and object (if any) is construed. In this, the Frankfurt School Tradition pro-

pounded an influential thesis on the character of modern, capitalist-patriarchal society, namely

that it yields an ominous “second nature”3, which at the same time separates men from its sur-

roundings and from itself and binds them under a yoke of a society, which is essentially guided

by a non-humane and non-natural logic, which incorporates elements of both. This theme, which

is generally subsumed under the broad term “fetishism” informs much of the critical dialectical

tradition, but in its intrinsic nature-relation (Naturverhältnis) it can best be studied in the work of

Alfred Schmidt. In his major Work “Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx“ (Schmidt

1978), Schmidt argues for a materialist approach to (capitalist) second nature, which remains con-

scious (Eingedenken) of the “first-order” preconditions for individual and collective well-being.

His critique of the “self-forgetting subject” (Schmidt 1978, 46) retains a certain humanist verge,

which is chiefly oriented against the “anti-humanist” (structuralist) tradition that emerged in

France around its central protagonist Louis Althusser (Althusser 1965). Yet even if his enlight-

ened framework is not unanimously shared, one can learn an important thing from his standpoint

of critique, which in fact formulates the very basis for critique as an analytical and normative

operation.

“Wie aber, bleibt zu fragen, will Althusser die “Ideologie” des Humanismus “in ein In-

strument der reflektierenden Einwirkung auf die Geschichte […] verwandeln“ (Althusser 1965,

183), wenn theoretische Reflexion sich nur auf Kategorien erstreckt, die keiner Philosophie des

Menschen verhaftet sind?“ (Schmidt 1970, 203)

Schmidt argues that in order to maintain a critical moment, materialism per definition can-

not be anti-historicist and anti-normative, as both are inextricably welded in really existing soci-

ety. In other words: the critical aspect in critique always takes up specific4 normative moments

3 The motive and designation are taken from Hegel (Hegel 1970a, §410; 1970b, §4 ), but turned from a

positive to a negative connotation in e.g. Georg Lukács (Lukács 1963, 61ff) and Theodor Adorno (Adorno 2003). 4 The definition of this specificity is however the crucial point. In this, I would go with the critics and ad-

mit that the lineage of (bourgeois) humanism has to be seriously broken and be replaced by a more complex and at

12

and fuses them with an analytical perspective on social ontology. Any philosophy that doesn’t

proceed this way in order to get rid of anthropocentrism or humanism in all its degrees (and still

strives to be “materialist”), hence, ultimately is bound to end up with what it actually sought to

combat in the first place: a metaphysical ontology, which reduces the subject to objectivity and

the object to a (oblique) subjectivist concept. Its attempt to escape the vicious circle of dialectics

is doomed to reproduce it on a different, more abstract but also falsely disoriented level (Schmidt

1970, 241). It is this fundamental negligence of the inexorability of a realist ontology and a dia-

lectical take in materialism, the “fluidification” of frameworks of (culturalist) critique, which

leads post-materialist and new-materialist critical theories astray. In fact, NM’s outcry against the

errant paths post-materialist criticism has taken, isn’t due to its neglecting the domain of “facts”

as “matters of concern” (Latour 2004, 231), but is rooted in the basic framework of critique.

So if we are to approach the nature-society relation, we cannot get around the subject-

object dialectic and with it the problematic of historicity. We cannot – as Bachelard suggest –

reduce the subject to an objective problematic and equally have to cast aside the Bergsonian dream

of a (processing) “real object”, which solves the problems of dialectical metaphysics (Bergson

2002b, 246). Both can be shown to be interrelated in a false reflection of the real negative consti-

tution of “Naturverhältnisse” in our current historic formation. With Schmidt, it is exactly the

second nature of Capitalism that produces this interrelated set of false assumptions and with it a

plethora of confusions about the “real” character of the relationality. To some degree, it can in

fact be said that this “real” character – insofar as it is part of society – is the problem; yet this

seemingly solid reality has to be understood as a historically relative one. It is a product of reified

relations amongst men and an enigmatic quasi-social automatism of things, modern fetishism,

which constitutes the realm of a negative (as in: not positively graspable) second nature that en-

gulfs sociality and hence also the social perspective on (first) nature.

“Die erste Natur als außerhalb der Menschen bestehende Dingwelt beschreibt Hegel als

blindes, begriffsloses Geschehen. Die Welt des Menschen, soweit sie Gestalt annimmt in Staat,

Recht, Gesellschaft und Ökonomie ist ihm „zweite Natur“5, manifestiert Vernunft, objektiver

Geist. Dem hält die Marxsche Analyse entgegen, daß die zweite Natur bei Hegel eher zu beschrei-

ben wäre mit den Begriffen, die er selbst auf die erste anwendet, nämlich als Bereich der Begriffs-

losigkeit, in dem blinde Notwendigkeit und blinder Zufall koinzidieren.“ (Schmidt 1978, 36f)

the same time abstract definition of a thin “normative rest”, making critique a “thick” one mainly on the basis of the

negative approach to existing relations, not the utopia of coming (or past) ones. 5 (Hegel 1970b, §4)

13

This “coincidence of necessity and contingency“ is exactly what characterises modern ma-

teriality’s real-abstract quality – it is a quality that is substantive and non-substantive at the same

time, like the commodity, which equally is a “substantial thing” and a “social fragment”. This

harbors a peculiar “negative ontology” (Schmidt 1978, 85) that seeks to decipher the specific

character of the modern “Stoffwechsel von Mensch und Natur” (Schmidt 1978, 85) and its op-

pressive character. It is this peculiar modern “Naturverhältnisse” that necessitate dialectical cri-

tique of the “false dynamism of matter”, which is, pace NM (Cheah 2008, 86), not in any way

immanent to (first) nature, but essentially social. As Capitalism’s second nature systematically

obscures the character of the relation between nature and society, it fosters the view that the very

difference itself is not in the last instance a problem of the social world, but immanent to quasi-

organic, given “structure” which fuses time and space as noumenality and reality (Cheah 2008,

84). From the perspective of this – social – fusion of space/time, it must seem as if it were insep-

arable. But the solution to the riddle of the opposition between space and time cannot, as Bergson

intended, be seen as pre-given, but it has to be ardently shaped out in a concrete-complex account

of the historical form that it takes. Far from being already intertwined in any meaningful way,

spatio-temporal relations are governed by the abstract rules of a tautological system that Marx and

with him Schmidt analysed in its “economic” sides, but which broader scope is far from reduced

to this field. Turning to a possible expansion of this perspective in the “substantial” field of gender

relations, I now want to conclude this paper.

Towards a substantial conclusion: a gendered difference that really matters

If we take up the dialectical approach, we can now finally make sense of the questions in

the “substantially social” field of gender relations. Following the Frankfurt School line, we dis-

cover some serious indicators of how nature and naturalisation are in capitalist-patriarchal society

and its “Dialectics of Enlightenment” interrelated in a determinately gendered way. We find al-

ready with the original work by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno a sublime gendered sub-

text that implicitly associates the modern “homo oeconomicus”, the abstract “subject of history”

with (symbolic) masculinity (Schultz 1992, 33). This is evident in the metaphorical figure of Ulys-

ses, who has to withstand amongst others the witch Circe, who is at the same time temptress and

representative of a long forgotten immanence in nature.

„Als Repräsentantin der Natur ist die Frau in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft zum Rätsel-

bild von Unwiderstehlichkeit und Ohnmacht geworden. So spiegelt sie der Herrschaft die eitle

Lüge wider, die anstelle der Versöhnung der Natur deren Überwindung setzt.“ (Adorno 1986, 79)

14

Women aren’t actively participating in the heroic effort of subjugation of nature, but they

are also not outside of it. In modern patriarchal society, they are facing a twofold oppression: they

are excluded from the modern hegemonial subject form that is associated with the subjugation of

nature and they are implicitly naturalized as being “closer to nature”, immanent, passive and de-

graded to reproduction. In this constellation, it is obvious that women have to decide between

“housewife or hetaerae”, between representing the essentialisation of nature and struggling against

it, at the cost of being alienated (Adorno 1986, 81). Women can only be part of the domination of

nature by giving up their womanliness (which they can hardly ever completely achieve), apart

from that they can “be” nature, much like, for Jacques Lacan, they can “be” the “phallus” (Lacan

1999, 583). Adorno and Horkheimer didn’t take this critique to its limits, in fact it was only really

elaborated by their (female) students, who made the abstract glimpses of a critique of the patriar-

chal character of nature-relations more concrete and also substantial (Kulke 1989, 107). This made

it possible to distinguish between (ideological) generalisations and concrete realities of women

(Schultz 1992, 35). Yet a marking general problematic remains – that of difference. Unlike in the

French debate however, the theme is situated in a materialist-dialectic critique of a historical social

formation, which brought this kind of naturalized difference about in the first place. Such a cri-

tique was further developed by the German theoretician Roswitha Scholz (Scholz 2000; 1992;

2005a; b; 2011), who argued that this fetishized nature-sociality-relation was, amongst other fea-

tures, a peculiarity of a “commodity producing patriarchy” that yields a “value-diremption”, a

basic dialectical contradictoriness, which permeates social relations and systematically obfuscates

any “neutral” perspective on social ontology. In this, the view is always already gendered and

simultaneously constituted by a “gender fetish” (cf. Flatschart 2012, 410) unique to an automotive

and tautological system-logic’s functionality of the binary of the (universal) value principle and

its (particularistic) gendered Othering, the difference immanent in the abstract social forms.

Following this perspective, we can now ultimately come to understand the basis for the

seemingly transversal character of the gendered body in a fetishiszed set of real contradictions

functional for modern patriarchy. It is thus not the case, like NM argues, that a contingent trans-

versality between the body and the person is a pre-given, super-historical condition that is equally

discretionarily to be analysed by science studies; it is rather the product of a certain historical

system of oppression and its ideologies, which preconfigures the social character of all statements

on the relation of nature and the social and thereby hampers all attempts of non-oppressive (sci-

entific) accounts of the ontological and epistemological character of the relation proper. While

NM’s advocacy for a “material” turn as towards “linguisticism” is thus to be welcomed, its actual

yield not only falls short of any kind of meaningful materialism, it moreover can be read as a

15

reflection of ideological relations prevalent in current society: NM decontextualizes the nature-

society relation by first delinking it from a realist ontology and epistemology and secondly repro-

ducing the very relationality that appertains to modern capitalist patriarchy in a “generalized pro-

cess ontology” exempt from its real historical dynamo, its socio-material substance. The confla-

tion of a Bachelardian epistemological move away from ontology and a Bergsonian step into a

hollow “epistemologized” ontology is symptomatic for this path away from questions of historical

materiality, which in many respects reproduces its unique ideological matrix. The tautological and

contingent nature of the “self-acting matter” can thus be seen as a product of modern patriarchy’s

idiosyncratic “second nature”, which is intrinsically gendered and related to the “material” logic

of Capitalism. This second nature is however – as durable as it may seem today – not ahistorical,

just as the ideologies it engenders aren’t forever bound to be all-engulfing. It is thus conceivable

that both the relation of nature and society and their innate entanglement with a patriarchal logic

may at some point not anymore be in the way of a more pellucid scientific perspective on the

dualistic structure of scientific thinking. This would presuppose an active and social change in the

realms of society and its relations to nature, which is all too much swept under the table in NM.

Furthermore, such an endeavour would require a materialist critique that is historical and aware

of the complexity and necessity of a subject-object-dialectical approach. Only with it, I shall con-

clude, can we make sense of the historical and material character of the (gendered) theme of dif-

ference in modern society and particularly in the grounding nature-society-relation. In order to

make matter an issue that really matters, we are well advised to return to questions of an “older”

materialism, which – as I have tried to show – are all but obsolete and worked through.

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