New
Materialism

A spool of thread can neither run nor talk; and yet, it does both in Franz Kafka's short story "Cares of a Family Man" from 1919. Moving and chatting all by itself, Kafka's spool presents itself as a puzzling enigma for the reader as well as the narrator who simply cannot figure out what kind of being this lively thing is: a diminutive human of wood or a somewhat untraditional tool? Jane Bennett, however, is less in doubt. In Vibrant Matter (2010) she utilizes Kafka's story and its non-human protagonist for making present and tangible her ontological concept of vital materiality. Here, the not-quite-dead and not-quite-living spool becomes a speculative figure for imagining what life beyond anthropocentric dichotomies between "dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us, beings)" might look and feel like (Bennett, 2010, p. vii).

While Vibrant Matter has indeed been influential, Bennett is not alone in such endeavours. Her reading of Kafka is but one instance of a much larger theoretical trend where (feminist) new materialist scholars turn to literature or literariness when thinking through post-anthropocentric notions of materiality (see e.g. Alaimo, 2010, and 2016; Barad, 2015; Haraway, 2016; Kirby, 2011; Neimanis, 2017, and Rivera, 2015). At first sight, though, literature does not seem to be the most obvious alliance for such projects. How, we might ask, does one align the renewed emphasis on the non-human agency of materiality, biology, and nature emblematic of new materialism with a phenomenon that is traditionally associated with a wholly different domain, namely the all-too-human character of discourse, textuality, and semiotics?

This challenge is, of course, not an easy one. But one way to bridge the gap, it seems, has been to recast literature as a material force that exceeds the domain of the Anthropos by resisting the epistemological inspections of the reader. No longer simply a discursive site for negotiating more or less subversive identity constructs, literature becomes an abstruse and recalcitrant non-human actor that can never be fully known. Thinking of "seemingly and obviously immaterial events such as a reading of a text" as in fact deeply entangled with complex material forces, Claire Colebrook claims, seems to return "us to what Derrida referred to as undecidability. There is no way of knowing the proper sense of a text" (Colebrook, 2011, p. 12 and 19).

While this way of recasting the materiality of the signifier as the materiality of the object has been quite popular in literary theory informed by speculative realism (Harman, 2012; Joy, 2013), such explanations are not adequate for Bennett's engagement with Kafka nor the majority of new materialist involvements with literary texts. In fact, these involvements seem to enact a quite different approach, highlighting literature's ability to, not withdraw from the reader, but cultivate more matter-attuned and fine-grained sensibilities. Rather than stipulating an epistemological aporia of matter (instead of signs), several key figures construe literature as a privileged site for affectively and imaginatively exploring the world of material forces. "Poetry," Bennett writes, "can help us feel more of the liveliness hidden in such things and reveal more of the threads of connection binding our fate to theirs" (Bennett, 2012, p. 232). Similarly, Stacy Alaimo claims that "producers of various works of literature, art, and activism may themselves grapple with ways to render murky material forces palpable" (Alaimo, 2010, p. 9). Studying the affective enfleshments in postcolonial writings, Mayra Rivera too maintains that "literary language, such as [Frantz] Fanon's, engages our imaginations at a visceral level, to help us feel what cannot be seen" (Rivera, 2015, p. 141). Here, literature becomes a privileged technology for rendering the somewhat abstract notions of new materialism palpable, sensible, and felt.

Although new materialism has not yet fully consolidated itself as a distinct approach within the field of literary studies, the last-mentioned concept of literature seems to resonate with a number of studies generated in recent years within the subdisciplines of ecocriticism (see Oppermann & Iovino, 2014; Ivonio, 2018a, 2018b; Oppermann 2018; and Trumpeter, 2015), posthuman literary studies (see Thomsen 2013; Dinello 2005; Squier 2004 and Lau 2018) and feminist literary criticism (see Yi Sencindiver, 2014, Skiveren, 2018, and Ryan, 2013). While these disciplines take the non-human agency of nature, technology, and corporeality as their respective points of departure, they all utilize literature as a speculative site of figur(at)ing out what a world of vibrant matter, trans-corporal flows, intra-active entanglements, and in-corporeal materialities might look and feel like. We are not the same as a spool of thread, and a spool of thread is not the same as us; and yet, these studies demonstrate, Kafka's short story might help us sense (and make sense of) the idea that these differences are differences of degree rather than kind.

Affiliation
Ph.d. Fellow, University of Aarhus, Denmark
Website

Synonyms: Poetry, literary studies, literary theory, Kafka
Antonyms: Anti-aesthetics
Hypernyms: Aesthetics

References:
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Alaimo, S. (2016). Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minnesota: Minnesota University Press.
Barad, Karen. (2015). Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/realities and Queer Political imaginings. GLQ, Volume 21(2-3), pp. 387-422.
Bennet, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bennett, J. (2012). Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton. New Literary History, Volume 43(2), pp. 225-233.
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