Of Markets and Materiality: Financialization and the Limits of the Subject

CONTEMPORARY THEORY'S ANTINOMY

There is an antinomy structuring contemporary theory. This is the antinomy between the engagement with materiality in a range of different work by feminists, object-oriented ontologists, speculative realists, and posthumanists and the work being done on financialization, immateriality, and the subjectivity under the rubrics of communism and Marxist theory. Thus on the one side, we have the writings of thinkers such as Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Stacy Alaimo, Susan Hekman, and Timothy Morton that take materiality and the domain of objects as their central area of inquiry, sometimes to the effacement of the subject and the subjective.¹ On the other side, there are Italian Marxists, such as Antonio Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Franco "Bifo" Berardi, and those working under a revitalized conception of communism, including Alain Badiou, Jodi Dean, Bruno Bosteels, and Slavoj Žižek, who, despite their claims to be practicing a form of materialism, focus almost entirely on a politics of the subjective and the political in which materiality and the material dimensions of economic production seems to be backgrounded, if not entirely absent.²

This antinomy may not be anything more than a new iteration of the subject/object opposition, which, as Adorno has argued, has troubled much post-Enlightenment thought, and which spurred the critical theorist to develop his concept of negative dialectics as a way of forestalling the reduction of the object to the domain of the subject. Adorno instead works to maintain the "object's preponderance," refusing to sublate the particularity and heterogeneity of the latter fully into the domain of the subjective (183). The concrete historical situation that produced Adorno's reflections has changed in the present moment, yet his diagnosis remains resonant. While we may want to rethink the category of the subject for our own present moment, as Sean Grattan and Christian Haines forcefully argue in the introduction to this special issue in order to consider the "what" that an exclusive focus on the subject excludes, this "what" must include not only the dimensions of affect, embodiment, and (trans-)individuation that exceed and set limits on, as well as enable, the subject, but also those other, more alien, forms of materiality that are bound up with the domain that Adorno calls the object. If the epistemological danger in Adorno's moment was the eradication of any account of the object's preponderance, in other words its semiautonomy, obduracy, and heterogeneity, then the most pressing epistemological danger of our own moment is a breakdown of any account of the relationship between embodied and lived singularities (i.e., the subject and that which exceeds yet traverses it) and other forms of materiality (whether negative dialectical or otherwise). Thus, while the posthumanists, object-oriented ontologists, and speculative materialists seem entirely preoccupied with various forms of nonhuman materialities, often to the exclusion of theorizing the domain of the human, those theorizing from within the rubrics of Marxism, political theory, and communism place the subjective and the immaterial at center stage, foregoing any account of the resistance to such dynamics exerted by the material world, including material aspects of the political-economic and the ecological.

Ironically, this antinomy appears to be the reverse of the one that characterized theoretical production in the 1990s. In that earlier era, one associated with the prevailing discourses of postmodernism, or what Alaimo and Hekman name (after Richard Rorty) the "linguistic turn," poststructuralist inflected philosophy and cultural theory privileged the softer, constructed materialities of language and culture, while Marxist theory advanced a critique of this discourse as insufficiently materialist (1). The chiasmus done by Marxist theory and philosophically inflected critical theory in the present moment suggests that there is something at work more generally in our contemporary political-economic, social, and ecological situation that makes it difficult to envision and theorize the relationship, however complex and mediated, between subject and object, and, more broadly, between tendencies toward dematerialization, on the one hand, and various manifestations of the material (including forms of materiality produced by rematerialization), on the other. One possible reason for the persistence of...