New materialism and the stuff of humanism

Addressing current attempts to describe culture as an entanglement of humans and nonhumans, this paper questions the now pervasive new materialist strategy of, in Jane Bennett’s phrase, ‘bracketing off’ exceptionalist ideas about the human in order to arrive at a non-humanist conception of culture. In identifying human exceptionalism with Christian or Cartesian metaphysics, new materialism has tended to reject humanism as just a belief, a fantasy. Our contention here, however, is that this strategy constitutes something of a blind spot for the claim—which we share—that everything is material. Noting the materiality of humanism itself, including its contemporary expressions, what this mode of ontological critique misses, we claim, is the fact that even ‘immaterialist’ conceptions of the human are material constructs. Humanism cannot be considered as some sort of otherworldly belief, upheld by blind faith. It is not a fixed and unchanging doctrine to which the material can simply be opposed. Rather, the argument of this paper is that humanism must be understood as a worldly—and so shifting and contingent—assemblage of ideas, practices and technologies. A materialist engagement with, rather than disengagement from, the idea of human exceptionality is therefore crucial if this idea is to be exposed, not as unrelenting; but rather, as Bruno Latour puts it, to ‘the troubling and exhilarating feeling that things could be different’.