The New Reification, or Quotidian Materialism

Near the end of his magisterial new book Other Things (2015), Bill Brown pauses his sweeping account of the history and power of objects (and what he terms things, the uncanny dimension of objects in twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy, art, and literature) to consider a critique of the form of concrete materialism he is championing. The critique comes from another branch of materialism—the political-economic materialism of Marxist theory—via one of its most celebrated practitioners:

Before the end of the twentieth century, Fredric Jameson had summed up, vehemently, some of the risks entailed by any such critical cathexis on concrete objects. . . . Jameson points out how Georg Simmel's ... "phenomenological commitment to the concrete"—to particularity and empiricity—"forestalls concept-formation" and results in an inability to move "towards the absolute of universal or abstract ideas."

(271)

With characteristic lucidity, in "The Theoretical Hesitation" (1999), Jameson voices a concern that has only grown more urgent with the full-scale emergence of the material turn in the twenty-first century. While we have an ever greater set of tools and frameworks for theorizing materiality in the humanities and social sciences (from the growth of object studies in literary criticism, a field that Brown essentially created; to material culture studies in the humanities and social sciences more generally; to newer developments that have taken place under the rubrics of new materialism and speculative realism in the fields of critical theory and philosophy), a situation that is a marked improvement over the constructivist abstractions of the high moment of the linguistic and cultural turns, what is missing from most of these new materialist approaches is any engagement with the forms of systematic materialism central to Marxist theory.

The materialism that has become most prominent as new in our present moment is decidedly the concrete one that Brown articulates. Even when it is thinking more about systems, say in the important ecological work done by Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, or Stacy Alaimo, this new materialism thinks about systems in a relatively local sense, in terms of the particular workings of assemblages or ecosystems. Thus, the level of what Jameson describes as the abstract or the universal is never invoked in this form of materialism. Leaving to one side Jameson's invocation of ideas (which of course does suggest that such a materialism can only be apprehended through the mediation of abstract ideas), an understanding of materialism as systematic possibility and constraint is precisely what is at stake in Marxist accounts of political economy. It is because of the definite limits and possibilities set up by the development and distribution of the productive forces and the means of production at any moment that, as Marx famously argues, "men make their own history but they do not do it as they please" (The Eighteenth Brumaire, ch. 1).

So has this opposition between these two versions of materialism hardened into an antinomy in the present? Do we need to choose between a political-economic account of historical possibilities and limits within the capitalist world-system on the one hand and a complex but local account of materiality on the other? Is there any way beyond this opposition? My provisional answer is "yes," but it also is striking how difficult it is to think through this opposition in our current intellectual moment. The refusal to engage this opposition shapes all of the books under review, including Brown's, which comes closest to theorizing and historicizing new materialism's emergence. Even in Other Things, however, after invoking Jameson's critique, Brown retreats to the surer ground of analyzing specific objects and how they exceed their use and exchange values without theorizing the relationship between these different registers.

What is emerging in much new materialist and object-oriented...