New Materialism and the Eco-Marxist Challenge

Abstract

In recent years, the critical vocabulary of the environmental humanities has shifted. After a decade burgeoning with new materialist explorations of intra-active entanglements and nonhuman vitalities, scholars are today becoming increasingly interested in the environmental effects of capitalism, its ecological rifts, fossil economy, and omnipresent wastescapes. Driving this shift is a reinvigoration of eco-Marxist thinking, which not only offers new focus points but also launches philosophical polemics against the field’s longstanding turn to matter. Facing these polemics, scholars in the environmental humanities are currently facing a difficult choice: should we opt for an “old” or a “new” materialism? This essay argues that this confrontation between new materialism and eco-Marxism pivots not on ontological differences, as is often assumed, but on diverging attitudes toward critical methodologies. It claims specifically that many of the recent polemics practice a kind of philosophical shadowboxing that blurs a more fundamental disagreement about the role and status of “critique.” Staging an encounter between Andreas Malm’s The Progress of This Storm (2018) and Jane Bennett’s Influx and Efflux (2020), the essay makes its case by demonstrating, first, how an attachment to critical methodologies drives eco-Marxists to polemicize against ontologies that, in fact, resemble their own. It then shows how new materialists advance such ontologies to supplement these critical methodologies with more affectively engaged modes of scholarship. By framing the debate in this way, the essay ultimately aims to push back against the methodological dogmatism of eco-Marxists who take critique to be the only legitimate mode of inquiry.