We often treat objects as ballast: mute stuff that props up the human story. New materialism flips the stage lights. What if matter—plastics, power grids, weather systems, lithium—has its own momentum? What if culture is co-authored by things that push back, drift, leak, and vibrate?
Emerging across philosophy, feminist science studies, and STS, new materialism challenges the old split between passive matter and active mind. Think Karen Barad’s agential realism (phenomena are produced through “intra-action,” not preexisting entities colliding), Jane Bennett’s vibrant matter (things have lively capacities), and Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman ethics (subjects are assembled from human and nonhuman forces). The aim isn’t to mystify objects; it’s to notice how material processes shape what counts as thought, choice, and agency.
What is New Materialism
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From objects to agencies. Matter is not raw clay awaiting human inscription; it has propensities. A virus mutates; concrete cures and cracks; a battery overheats. These capacities don’t erase human responsibility—they complicate it.
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Entanglement over interaction. Barad’s term intra-action reminds us that boundaries are outcomes, not givens. A lab apparatus and a particle co-produce a result; a content moderation system and its training data co-produce what “harm” looks like. Agency lives in the relation.
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Assemblages and scale. Following Deleuze/Guattari (and DeLanda), new materialists see social life as assemblages: ad hoc gatherings of bodies, tools, codes, climates. Power flows across scales—hand, warehouse, ocean current—without a single sovereign center.
Case in Point
Consider the smartphone. It isn’t a neutral portal to culture; it is culture, condensed. Cobalt from the Congo meets Chinese assembly lines, Californian UX, Chilean lithium brines, and your fingertip oil. Haptics choreograph attention; push notifications modulate cortisol; aging batteries slow apps, nudging upgrades. A new-materialist lens reframes debates about “screen time” into questions about material-temporal capture: how devices reorganize our bodies and ecologies long before we “decide” anything.
Or take microplastics. They are not simply pollution we produced but actors that now infiltrate blood, plankton, clouds. They refract sunlight, alter weather microdynamics, ferry endocrine disruptors across species. Policy that treats plastics as post-consumer waste misses their ongoing life—their capacity to author futures we then must inhabit.
New materialism is practical. It pushes researchers and designers to follow forces across domains: map a content platform through server heat and water usage; track a logistics algorithm through diesel particulates and warehouse injuries; read architecture via mold blooms and ventilation routes. Crucially, it guards against “human exceptionalism” and against a lazy flattening. Differences matter: a hurricane’s agency isn’t the same as a contract’s; both still shape a neighborhood.
Why New Materialism Matters
Designers, policymakers, and activists already negotiate with nonhuman forces—though often implicitly. A new-materialist stance makes the negotiation explicit: write building codes for fungi and humans; price cloud computing with rivers in mind; regulate antibiotics across hospitals and aquaculture; plan transit as a choreography of bodies, batteries, and temperatures. In classrooms and studios, it trains attention: Which materials are speaking? Through what failures, frictions, or leaks?
Critics worry that new materialism romanticizes things while sidelining labor, race, and capital. That risk is real when “vibrancy” becomes a vibe. The stronger versions braid material agency with political economy: petroleum’s viscosity meets redlined neighborhoods; data centers’ thirst hits Indigenous water rights; heat waves amplify carceral geographies. In this register, new materialism sharpens—rather than blurs—justice: it tracks how inequality travels through pipes, polymers, and power surges.
New materialism asks for a humbler hero story. We’re not puppet masters of inert stuff, nor puppets of inscrutable matter. We’re partners in unstable assemblies, answerable to forces we set in motion and that now set us in motion. The ethic that follows is unspectacular and rigorous: notice the nonhumans, measure their push, and build with—rather than against—the agencies already at work.
