Have we ever been social? New materialism and economics.

This call starts with a polemic: that, despite their talk about a common human-nonhuman sociality, the majority of new materialisms have evacuated economics from the idea of the social. This statement is made with two disclaimers: 1) Early new materialist texts, such as Donna Haraway’s A Manifesto for Cyborgs (1985), Manuel DeLanda’s One Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997) or Bruno Latour’s Aramis, Or the Love of Technology (1996), did engage with economics, though this trajectory seems largely abandoned, affirmative of the status quo, or become replaced with an explicitly anti-anticapitalist rhetoric. 2) There are scholars who have been working on the economisation of the nonhuman (Barua, 2016; Clark & Yusoff, 2014; Ferreira da Silva, 2022; Mbembe, 2017; Murphy, 2017; Ouma, 2016; Swyngedouw, 1996; Tallbear, 2015; Tsing, 2015; Verran, 2011; Yusoff, 2017), though not necessarily through an exclusively new materialist framework.

It has been argued that new materialisms comprise a diverse set of theories. At the same time, there is a degree of homogeneity through the shared ambition to contest hegemonic Western thought patterns and related practices (e.g. binaries, anthropocentricity). This quasi decolonial focus on knowledge has also led to critiques of science, its function as part of colonialism, though mostly through the Western canon itself. While many new materialist authors have stressed the relation between science, or knowledge, and economics, it feels as the current form of economics has been too often accepted as given. In the search for improvements, this acceptance has led to problematic intellectual detours. Examples include forays into Malthusianism and environmental determinism, directions of thought to which most new materialisms have explicitly been opposed (Haraway, 2016; Latour, 2024; Lewis, 2017).

At the same time, this turn is not surprising. New materialisms’ theoretical alliances tend to be marked by hostility towards economics (e.g. criticism of Marx as humanist, privileging of Nietzsche who naturalised economic status). Further, there are obvious perils of decolonisation from within. This can be seen in the increasing adoption of far right and nationalist theorists (Schmitt, Heidegger, Péguy, Renan), as well as the seemingly untainted terminology of the ‘nonhuman’. As the current ‘culture wars’ illustrate, far right ideologies misrepresent (political, economic, physical) threats, using fabricated dangers (e.g. Muslims, trans people) to distract from economic issues in particular. There are growing parallels with new materialism’s economic anxieties.

Against this development, this call represents an appeal for a more thoughtful engagement with new materialisms’ decolonial ambitions and how such reconsiderations might translate into an engagement with economics. As authors such as Zoe Todd (2016) have argued, this needs to entail a greater dialogue with decolonial approaches in the first place. In the recognition of a common desire to expand the social beyond the human, both approaches carry a potential to challenge current economic imaginaries. This does not merely encompass questions about the valuation of ‘nature’ and the boundaries that are drawn around it for this very purpose. It is also, more generally, about the ability to expose the very material foundations of seemingly immaterial processes. Such investigations could, for example, respond to the imaginations of financial flows and other ‘unreal’ economic processes, or uncover historical relations that carry the potential for change.

To learn more about elibility, timelines, and submission details, visit the announcement at Anthropocenes.