The Transversality of New Materialism

Abstract

This article centres around three ways in which ‘new materialism’ or ‘neomaterialism’—terms coined by DeLanda and Braidotti in the second half of the 1990s—can be called ‘transversal’. New materialism is a cultural theory that does not privilege culture, but focuses on what Haraway would call ‘naturecultures’. It explores a monist perspective of the human being, disposed of the dualisms that have dominated the humanities until today, by giving special attention to matter, as it has been so much neglected by dualist thought. New materialism, a cultural theory inspired by the thoughts of Deleuze, that spurs a renewed interest in philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibniz, shows how cultured humans are always already in nature, and how nature is necessarily cultured, how the mind is always already material, and how matter is necessarily something of the mind. New materialism opposes the transcendental and humanist (dualist) traditions that are haunting a cultural theory that is standing on the brink of both the modern and the post-postmodern era. The transcendental and humanist traditions, which are manifold yet consistently predicated on dualist structures, continue to stir debates that have a stifling effect on the field (think of the feminist polemic concerning the failed materialism in the work of Butler, and of the Saussurian/Lacanian linguistic heritage in media and cultural studies). New materialism allows for the conceptualisation of the travelling of the fluxes of matter and mind, body and soul, nature and culture, and opens up active theory formation. The three transversalities concern disciplinarity, paradigms and the spatiotemporality of theory.

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