Unraveling the Being of Materiality

Christopher Breu’s Insistence of the Material opens with the disarming image of the author’s own body summoned yet again to the operating table. Diagnosed as a child with a benign condition known as hypospadias—a form of intersex—Breu underwent a surgery that aimed to return him to an imagined state of normalcy. This first unnecessary operation was followed by fourteen surgeries over more than three decades, all caused by unforeseen medical “complications.” Thus Breu’s body acts both as a testament to the overmedicalization characteristic of the second half of the twentieth century and to the flesh’s unobliging tendency to challenge the medical corps’ binaristic conceptions of sex and gender. Failing to conform to dominant cultural and medical scripts, the body is the traumatic site from which arises the titular demand to recognize and theorize what Breu calls the “insistence of the material,” that is, materiality’s obstinate “resistance to and divergence from the dominance of biopolitical forms of governance” (x). Yet from the outset also looms the specter of the body’s complete obliteration, not just under the invasive scrutiny and practices of the medical establishment, but also under the biosubject’s own introspective eye, as the image on the cover of the book suggests. This image, a haunting embroidered photograph by Peruvian artist Ana Teresa Barboza, shows a female chest torn apart by the subject’s own hands and literally unraveling under its own gaze. Allegorized by threads of yarn, the body’s materiality simultaneously appears and disappears in its figuration. It is precisely the matter of figuration in the age of biopolitics—and, more specifically, the potentials and limitations of literary figuration—that Breu’s book proposes to examine.

From ailing and laboring bodies to the material elements that make up our late-capitalist ecosystems, “the material” for Breu names that which appears eminently vulnerable yet ultimately resistant to the universal solvent of biocapitalism. Probing literature’s capacities to attend to the “way in which material life is shaped in ever more intimate ways by biopolitics, thanatopolitics, and biopolitical production” (2), the book’s main contention is, paradoxically, that language is essentially inadequate when it comes to heeding “the various forms of materiality in contemporary social existence.” By dint of this very inadequacy, and even while he recognizes on occasion the linguistic as a specific “register” or “form of materiality” (38), Breu surreptitiously aligns language with the dematerializing forces of biocapitalism. Indeed, by positing an axiomatic allergy of the material to the forces that shape it—an absolute impermeability of substance to form—he claims that the “cultural and linguistic turns” have been historically complicit with the virtualizing tendencies of the post-Fordist era (4–7).¹ Pushed to its logical (though not fully acknowledged) conclusion, Breu’s thesis is that neo-liberal reason is at bottom linguistically structured. Given this deep-seated suspicion toward language and “the linguistic,” it is surprising that he would look to literature—and postmodernist fiction to boot, often caricatured as “pure metafictional play, as the irresponsible aesthetic of a dominant class of cultural producers” (25)—as a site for theorizing the intrinsic resilience of the material. In this paradox lies the book’s compelling if contentious ambition to identify within “the reviled object that is postmodern literature” a countertradition “engaged with tarrying with the material unconscious of late-capitalist existence” (25–27). I say contentious because the vein of experimental fiction that Breu names “late-capitalist literature of materiality” is not valorized because it circumvents the self-reflexiveness and hyper-referentiality often celebrated by postmodernism, nor even because it figures itself as a materialist practice,² but because of its uniquely negative capacity to “recognize” and “attend to” traces of a materiality that eludes linguistic logic. In other words, Breu is not arguing that language takes on its own materiality but that it traces in shadow the problem of biopolitics as language, positing thereby a clear-cut fracture between language and matter. Before examining in greater detail Breu...