The “New Materialist” Approach to Art and Aesthetics

More than any other philosophical movement in recent decades, the New Materialists exerted an influence on a wide range of artists from different artistic fields. The most salient example of this trend is the famous correspondence between philosopher Timothy Morton and Icelandic singer Björk. Morton is in fact calling on Björk to develop enchanted attentiveness to the non-human other and to ponder its relation to the work of art. But Björk is just one of a widening group of artists from different fields responding to the New Materialist call to newly investigate the enchantment of man with his animal and material environment.

Max Weber discussed the process of “disenchantment,” in which rationalism and scientific thought were supposed to induce the abandonment of broad theological schemas and religious narratives. Following Weber, Marcel Gauchet described how, from the Protestant Reformation to the present, the possibility of organizing all life spheres (science, art, economy, etc.) under the exclusive rule of religion was undermined. However, many contemporary scholars indicate ways in which modernity actually exhibits a process of re-enchantment: from American transcendentalism to the New Age movement, from the doctrine of Carl G. Jung to neo-pagan trends throughout Europe – “rational” Western man can still be seen searching for reasons for the world’s existence that transcend the realm of human rationality. We may wonder to what degree these attempts are rooted in a real “theology,” that is, in a systematic and orderly investigation of the sublime. These are, nevertheless, attempts to establish the meaning of human existence on foundations that are “greater than man.” Based on the philosophical approach of the “New Materialists,” in this short paper I will attempt to present a new and interesting perspective on the possibility of modern re-enchantment, showing how this phenomenon is necessarily related to aesthetics and art.

“New Materialism” encompasses a variety of theoretical and philosophical approaches that began to emerge from the early 2000's on. Common to all these approaches is the wish to see man as an integral part of the world’s “materia,” that is, of matter. For many years, argue the New Materialists, we have been habituated to think of man via a categorical distinction between “nature” and “culture”; this distinction positions man as an entity outside (and, for the most part, above) the various material spheres. The New Materialists, by contrast, seek to blur the categorical dichotomy between “nature” and “culture” and to show that man is not separate from the material ecological system that underlies the creation of the world. The human sense of subjectivity, they argue, does not reflect a pure cognitive space that exists outside the stream of material becoming. Rather, it reflects a space that is shaped by the material platform on which it rests, in accordance with the unique characteristics of the human organism. Thus, thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and Jane Bennett repeatedly emphasize that “becoming” means “becoming with” the various components of matter, and is inherently dependent on these components. Most histories of mankind, allege these scholars, exhibit “anthropocentric hubris” when dismissing the influence of the material environment on the emergence of human culture and institutions. These thinkers, by contrast, seek to show that the story of mankind cannot be told without taking into account such things as gut bacteria, photosynthesis, eyeglasses, and the fragrance of blooming hibiscus, which not only envelop man, but also shape him and enable his existence.

As we can sense so far, the New Materialist perspective involves a radically pluralist interpretative approach that understands every phenomenon in relation to the endless number of material currents that comprise it and act upon it. Based on this perspective, the New Materialists have even argued that, rather than seeing phenomena as self-enclosed “things” with clearly defined boundaries, they should be seen as flexible “totalities” composed of momentary and singular convergences of different forces. These totalities, they assert, are not organized in symmetrical, hierarchical, and orderly structures (as they appear in our imagination) but rather in an asymmetrical, decentralized, and even somewhat chaotic manner, within a continuous process of convergence, divergence, and metamorphosis. Our symbolic orderly constructions of the world, therefore, reflect anthropocentric models or “maps” that seek to “organize” the world that is in constant flux; the New Materialists see these maps as equivalent to an attempt to place a picture frame on a river torrent – they will always be too static and rigid compared to the material reality that abides beneath the surface.

What does a perspective based on a deterministic return to matter have to do with modern-day re-enchantment? A lot, argues Jane Bennett in her book The Enchantment of Modern Life. First, as we have seen, the viewpoint of the New Materialists defines itself as anti-anthropocentric and even post-humanist, since it does not see man as the only captain of the ship of history, but rather as one node in a broad, dynamic network of different phenomena. This perspective thus opens a window onto non-human otherness and on that which is “greater than man.” Such an approach is necessarily accompanied by mystery, excitement, wonder, and even fear of the unknown – since, as stated above, the becoming of the world involves a degree of chaos and disorder. It can even be argued that the New Materialist perspective evinces an apophatic sentiment, since it acknowledges the small scale of man’s orderly structures, which fail to contain the world as it really is. As shown by philosopher Gilles Deleuze (whose works are a major source of inspiration for the New Materialists), thinking the world is an act that requires openness to surprise and the abandonment of mundane, orderly mental frameworks. Man should “come out of himself” and give himself over to something larger.

Bennett cites the thought of philosopher and poet Henry David Thoreau as one example (out of many) of modern material enchantment. Thoreau’s poetry, argues Bennett, is open to this kind of enchanted attention – the gate to the wonderment awakened by man’s encounter with the natural environment. This wonderment is not elicited by a transcendent object situated outside the world, but rather by the rush of the world’s becoming, in which insects, grass, and people intermingle. Moreover, says Bennett, Thoreau did not believe in a categorical separation of “nature” from “culture,” and in his poetry one can find a sense of enchantment with material-human hybrid creatures and with the intermixture of these spheres. Thus, for example, in addition to natural phenomena such as lakes, deer, and trees, manmade creations such as deserted railroad tracks and prose works were, for him, objects of material wonder.

It should be noted that the New Materialist perspective recognizes the infinite mutuality of the world’s different phenomena, which come into being together within a network that, ultimately, connects them all. This understanding – regarding the unified nature of the world’s becoming, in which all of the world’s phenomena are interwoven in a way that cannot be unraveled – has caused some critics to characterize the New Materialist approach as “monistic.” To a large extent, New Materialism joins other forces of modern-day “re-enchantment” that oppose the Western individualist view of man as an independent atom separate from his environment. Instead, they emphasize the ways in which man is immanently intertwined with the entire cosmos. Furthermore, the “monistic” character of this perspective also carries the potential of modern re-enchantment with the singular creative power that drives the metamorphosis of the entire world (in this it is no different from many religious doctrines). In recent years, these emphases on interconnectedness and monism have influenced a new wave of spiritual ecology in the West, which joins the New Materialists in a call to abandon the differentiation between nature and culture, understand the powerful mutual relations between man and his environment, and, consequently, take renewed human responsibility for the natural world.

Rather than seeing phenomena as self-enclosed “things” with clearly defined boundaries, they should be seen as flexible “totalities” composed of momentary and singular convergences of different forces. These totalities, they assert, are not organized in symmetrical, hierarchical, and orderly structures (as they appear in our imagination) but rather in an asymmetrical, decentralized, and even somewhat chaotic manner, within a continuous process of convergence, divergence, and metamorphosis. Our symbolic orderly constructions of the world, therefore, reflect anthropocentric models or “maps” that seek to “organize” the world that is in constant flux; the New Materialists see these maps as equivalent to an attempt to place a picture frame on a river torrent – they will always be too static and rigid compared to the material reality that abides beneath the surface.

More than any other philosophical movement in recent decades, the New Materialists exerted an influence on a wide range of artists from different artistic fields. The most salient example of this trend is the famous correspondence between philosopher Timothy Morton and Icelandic singer Björk. In one letter Morton wrote: "I can see these two 'channels' mixed together yet separated, like in a paradox: our 'human' statements about art, from which emerges a manifesto; and nonhuman beings, crowding in, laughing, crying and supporting and undermining and shadowing the human".

Morton is in fact calling on Björk to develop enchanted attentiveness to the non-human other and to ponder its relation to the work of art. But Björk is just one of a widening group of artists from different fields responding to the New Materialist call to newly investigate the enchantment of man with his animal and material environment, outside of the usual anthropocentric models. This trend may have its source in the assertions of some of the New Materialist thinkers, who argue that in light of the failure of man’s symbolic orderly structures to accurately describe reality, it is perhaps the artistic and aesthetic perspective that brings us closer to an optimal understanding of the world. The artistic-aesthetic perspective, they contend, is closer in essence to the world’s flux of becoming: in contrast with rational, symbolic cognition, which differentiates between clearly defined categories, aesthetic configurations excel in expressing sentiments such as flow, metamorphosis, chaos, interconnectedness, hybridity, and a closely interwoven world – all of which, as discussed above, are at the heart of New Materialist metaphysics. Therefore, art and aesthetics are a powerful means of mediating human enchantment with the world’s gradual becoming and its mysterious movement. 

There are even some who see New Materialist thought as a “philosophy of innovation and creativity,” since as part of the movement of becoming, entirely new conditions operate at any given moment, giving rise to new, unprecedented phenomena. To a large degree, man’s symbolic and rational cognitive structures fail before they even begin the attempt to describe this torrent of creative becoming, since they use mechanisms of generalization and imagined identity in order to artificially reduce the world’s novel and unique phenomena. By contrast, the artistic-aesthetic approach, at the core of which lie sentiments of innovation and creativity, exhibits greater openness to this flow of becoming and creative metamorphosis, and is therefore more suited to encourage and give voice to that which is “greater than man.”