New
Materialism

The word 'race' is often put in inverted commas in order to stress its constructed nature or to indicate that "there is no such thing as race" (Nayak, 2006, p. 411, italics in the original), in the sense that racism is regarded as an ideological construction, rather than a material fact. Race in the sense of an ideology and set of historical practices, and attempts to understand it as a social concept, rather than an ontological phenomenon, are of course justified. However, many scholars have recently paid attention to the materiality of race by arguing that the constructivist or 'nominal' approach leaves out the material dimensions of this phenomenon (see e.g. Chen, 2012; Hinton, Mehrabi & Barla 2015; Leppänen, 2017; Liu, 2015; M'charek, 2010 & 2013; Saldanha, 2007 & 2013; Slocum, 2008 & 2011; Vuolajärvi, 2011 & 2014). These approaches explore race as a relational phenomenon, and they enable us to go beyond the binary distinction between the material and the cultural (M'charek, 2013, p. 420).

Arun Saldanha writes that: "[t]hrough Deleuze it becomes possible to inquire whether the representationalism and dialectical logic that have guided the antiracist programme actively suppress an immanent-materialist legacy that may better suited to grasping how bodies are materially differentiated into hierarchies in the first place" (2013, p. 7). He proceeds by stating that "race is real", and hence, even if race is not set in stone, racial difference could be investigated "in itself as it persists as a biocultural, biopolitical force amid other forces" (ibid., 8).

When discussing gender, Deleuze and Guattari note that "the two sexes imply a multiplicity of molecular combinations bringing into play not only the man in the woman and the woman in the man, but the relation of each other to the animal, the plant, etc.: a thousand tiny sexes ." (1987, p. 213). The idea of a thousand tiny sexes has been applied by some scholars to race, with the concept of a thousand tiny races (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2013, p. 137; Puar, 2007, 209; Saldanha, 2006). The racialized categories of black and white, for example, could be said to multiply when human and non-human bodies intra-act with each other, and in these processes, a thousand tiny races evolve.

The categories of white and black are focal in the racialized processes of othering and hence, it is crucial to deconstruct the rigid and hegemonic binary of white and non-white. Instead of treating these as distinct and already-recognized categories, the concept of becoming can be used to transform racialized subjectivities from known entities and being into dynamic and relational material-discursive actualizations. Because becomings always happen in unforeseen ways, it is impossible to fully know or define categorically what blackness and whiteness are.

However, it must be stated that although this sense of a dynamic becoming might be 'possible', we live in a world where race is a pre-eminent ideological force powerfully defining everything from nation states to individual lives. Because of this, approaching race as a material phenomenon should not mean considering discursive formations and molar structures such as racialized identity categories unrelevant. The categories of black and white function undeniably at the level of macropolitics; but, as Moira Gatens insists, we "need to engage with the … norms of our culture on two fronts: the macropolitical and the micropolitical" (2000, p. 68). In Deleuze and Guattari's thinking, the "molecular" relates to becoming while the "molar" relates to being. Molar entities and politics work at the level of macrostructures and binaries, and include identities such as black and white, women and men, and human and non-human, whereas a molecular micropolitics "takes place outside or beyond the fixity of subjectivity and the structure of stable unities" (del Río 2008, p. 115). Molar and molecular cannot be characterized as good or bad and they are not opposites. Micropolitics calls for molecular becomings that leak out of molar identity categories. Noticing both material becomings and molar structures, affirming existing struggles and forming new and different articulations are needed in effective anti-racist politics.

Keywords: race, molar, molecular, micropolitics, macropolitics

References
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