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Terry Leahy 2018
New Materialism rejects the mind body split and sees it as one of a number of dualisms which New Materialism is able to transcend.
new materialist ontology cuts across ‘the mind-matter and culture-nature divides of transcendental humanist thought’ (Fox and Alldred 2016: 14)
I will approach this topic from a variety of angles. To begin I will refer the reader to ways of conceiving mind body dualism that break with the Western tradition but do not suppose a New Materialist ontology. While mind/body dualism is a convenient way of summarizing the Western tradition, there are some quite different versions. New Materialist writings attack all these in terms of the way the dualism has been read to reinforce gender, class and race inequities. These reflections on dualism are shared with a variety of critical writings that do not embrace a New Materialist ontology. Nevertheless New Materialist ontology certainly introduces some new arguments against mind body dualism and the purpose of the second part of this paper will be to review these ontological claims.
‘Mental’ and ‘biological’ as frameworks of understanding
I will being by outlining the lens through which I will be examining these issues. My analysis is like that of New Materialism in seeking to ‘transcend’ the different ways in which the Western tradition has conceived the mind/body dualism. Like New Materialists, I believe that some reflection on ‘mentalist’ and ‘materialist’ explanations is required. Sociologists need to drop the illusion that an explanation of society can be constructed using only mentalist concepts, without resort to accounts from the natural sciences (Leahy 2012; 2017). The following discussion of mind and body comes out of two philosophical standpoints. One is usually called ‘mind body identity’ theory or ‘materialism’ (for example Armstrong 1968, Dennett 1993).
the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon. In short, the mind is the brain. (Dennett 1993: 33)
While this may serve quite well as an overall picture of reality, it is highly unlikely that a language of cells and neurons will replace our use of mental concepts. Sociologists and lay people will continue to account for social events using a framework based in ‘mental’ concepts such as desire, intention, purpose, pain, satisfaction and so on. To understand how this could be the case, I will introduce a second perspective on mind body dualism. Mary Midgley argues that different explanatory frameworks can be equally valid ways of describing the same objects in the world.
Asking different kinds of questions produces different kinds of answers; they are usually not reducible to one another, though they must be compatible. Slicing the world in different directions reveals different patterns. Swiss rolls, sliced downwards, have a spiral structure. Sliced across, they have stripes. (Midgley 2002: 97)
Following Midgley’s point, my understanding is that materialist or biological accounts of people are one kind of framework for understanding what is going on, using concepts like DNA, blood cells, livers, neural pathways and so on. By contrast a ‘mentalist’ framework talks about objects that do not figure in the materialist conceptual map – like feelings, desires, thoughts and beliefs. In his defence of the materialist theory of the mind, Armstrong allows that such a way of looking at things is quite compatible with materialism (Armstrong 1968) and this is the view that will be adopted here. Let us now look at some examples of the way such an account views mind/body dualism.
In a mentalist understanding of things, our mind includes experiences of our body. So it makes no sense to talk about the mind as split from the body. Instead, in a great variety of situations our mind is ‘in the body’. For example we experience pain in our thumb.
Some of these bodily experiences are conscious but we must also be aware that our bodily experiences are often unconscious (Armstrong 1968). As in. ‘I did not realize I was so tired’. ‘Maybe I was just hungry’. It seems highly possible that Western culture has worked to ‘repress’ certain bodily experiences so that they are rarely entertained in consciousness. For example as I am learning to sing I am becoming aware of how my breath, chest and abdomen are producing the sound and ‘paying attention’ to that. I am aware that I have never really brought all this to consciousness before, even though these feelings have always been there. ‘Mindfulness’ is premised on the attempt to attend to the feelings and thoughts that are normally ignored. In that sense, ending the mind body split is about trying to undo conditioning which has prevented us paying attention to certain experiences of our bodies (Dowrick 2000).
There is a paradox of this mentalist framework. We experience – as though in our own body – things which we know are outside it. For example with a cane walking along a road, we experience the bump of the stick on the pavement as happening on the pavement, not as happening in our body or at our fingertips. Our mind experiences sensations as ‘in our mind’ and also outside our-self as though they were experiences of our own body (Dennet 1993). So there is a radical incompatibility between the mentalist framework of our understanding and a materialist framework, which can be revealed by asking the question – where does this sensation take place? In a biological materialist framework the experience takes place somewhere in the body, or at a number of places in the body at once. In a mentalist framework, we experience the sensation as taking place outside the physical limits of our own material body.
In this dual account of the meaning of the ‘mental’ and the ‘biological’, there is a limit to how far we would want to go in breaking down mind/body dualism. The mentalist and materialist framings of human behaviour are both necessary and they cannot readily be mapped onto each other, they remain different. On the other hand, seeing the ‘mental’ as a realm that is never embodied is to misunderstand the mentalist framework as we actually use it. Some things that are biological in one framing become mental in the other framing (for example our thumb becomes something that we experience directly in our mind). Likewise things that are mental in one framing become biological in the other (our decision to have spaghetti on Tuesday becomes a set of cellular episodes).
Cartesian dualism
The French philosopher Descartes (from the seventeenth century) is famous for the idea that the mind is a spiritual entity and that human bodies are merely machines (Descartes 2004). He also argued that animals do not have a ‘soul’ and accordingly are just machines, having no mind at all. This position is usually called Cartesian mind/body dualism and is often referred to in this way in New Materialist and Post-Humanist accounts (Budgeon 2003: Braidotti 2013). This Cartestian dualism runs into a number of problems. One is that the mind (as noted above) is ‘in the body’ – our mental experience includes experiences of our body. The parts of the body that Descartes supposes to be purely mechanical are also mental. Treating most of the body as a mere machine, the implication of Cartesian dualism is that the mind (as a spiritual object) is located in the brain. Descartes in fact assumes that the mechanism of the body transmits physical motions to the pineal gland, where the mind interprets these mental events in relation to the bodily event which provoked them. This does not correspond at all to the way we experience and think about our bodies. Another problem is that it is radically implausible to think that animals do not experience mental events, as Descartes concludes. Then there is the whole problem of how such a mental (spiritual) entity could possibly make contact with, let alone cause, events in the physical world (Armstrong 1968).
The critique of Cartesian dualism in New Materialist writings frequently focuses on the patriarchal implications of this position, following feminist critiques developed without the use of a New Materialist ontology (for example Plumwood 1993; Lloyd 1984).
The critique of a Cartesian approach to the mind/body relationship is a particularly well-established problematic for feminism. Indeed, a critique of this binary has been central to a feminist challenge to Western metaphysics, the foundation of which is the equivalence of the mind with the masculine and the privileging of the mind over the body – the devalued realm associated with the feminine. (Budgeon 2003: 40)
In this understanding, Descartes sees the disembodied mind as the place of rational thought, practiced by men, and women as merely bodies.
women are explicitly, even authentically positioned as bodies while men are explicitly located within the realm of thought, language, signification, logic and so forth. (Budgeon 2003: 41)
These analyses of the social implications of Cartesian dualism in practice are well made. Yet I am uneasy with the assertion that Cartesian dualism is wrong in every particular. Within the materialist framework for understanding mental events, there is an identity between our thoughts and feelings (our mental states) and the physical events taking place in our bodies. Though the brain is a primary location for these events, they also take place all over our bodies and these parts communicate. Given this kind of reflection, we may end up thinking Descartes does not go far enough. In one framework for understanding, human beings are not different to the animals he talks about – we are all biological machines.
Mental and bodily desires
A second version of mind/body dualism goes back to the Ancient Greeks and Christian theologians (for example Plato 1974; Aristotle 1969). This version of mind body dualism depends on an accidental feature of the way human drives are named and identified. Some are identifiable in relation to goals that can be named by referring to observable bodily manifestations –eating/ having sex/ being in good health/ physical comfort. The targets of our other basic drives cannot be named in relation to any particular bodily manifestation. For example autonomy/ sociability/ creativity. As aspects of human nature, these ‘mental’ desires are no different to drives like hunger. They come from within and animate conduct. However they do not animate conduct of any readily categorized physical type – related to a particular bodily event. It has been common to denigrate these ‘bodily’ desires and treat the other human desires as distinctive, truly ‘human’ and ethically superior (for example Aristotle 1969; Marx 1963). This demarcation has been used to explain and justify class and gender distinctions. The second set of drives are identified with ‘the mind’ (often referred to as ‘reason’) and the first set with ‘the body’. For example Plumwood describes Aristotle as having:
an intellectualist model of identity in which all other human functions exist in an instrumental support relation to reason, which is treated as the supreme good. (Plumwood 1993: 165; see also Lloyd 1984)
This analysis is taken up by New Materialists as an aspect of their critique of the mind/body split. For example, Budgeon quotes this passage from Bordo.
the body is the negative term, and if woman is body, then women are that negativity, whatever it may be: distraction from knowledge, seduction away from God, capitulation to sexual desire, violence or aggression, failure of will, even death. (Bordo, 1993: 5, emphasis in original) (in Budgeon 2003: 38)
The desire for knowledge (curiosity) and the pursuit of will (autonomy) are desires that are not identified in reference to particular bodily manifestations. The stigmatized desires – for sex, to do violence, the death of the body – are all associated with particular named bodily events.
The project of ‘bringing back the body’ in sociology is usually assumed to mean recognizing the relevance of these bodily desires and activities to social life and also acknowledging that, at least to a certain extent, they have a biological foundation (Turner 1996). Yet in fact all the drives of human nature have a biological foundation – including our desires for autonomy, creativity (including curiosity) and social pleasures. While instances of all basic desires may be socially constructed and personal in their detail, as ‘drives’ they are innate to the human species (Leahy 2017). They can be viewed in the mentalist framework – as uber desires of humans in general – or in a biological framework – as ‘drives’. The mistake of this critique of dualism is not that sociologists are now recognizing ‘bodily’ drives as at least partly innate but that they are restricting this recognition to this set of desires. This is very arbitrary really and turns on the way these drives are named in terms of identifiable bodily targets.
As indicated, this version of mind/body dualism promotes the view that reason should take pre-eminence over the body (Plumwood 1993). My view is that reasoning is always processing information with a view to action. It takes place in reference to any kind of desire whatsoever and is not absent in actions taken to pursue bodily desires. There is no ‘desire for reason’ as such. Reason is a method, not a desire. The idea that reason should take pre-eminence over the body is often taken to mean a particular kind of reasoning. It is when the subject looks at a proposed action in terms of a variety of desires they have and realizes that the (bodily) desire cannot be pursued without sacrificing some other desire – for example for a peaceful life, for wealth, for good company and esteem – and decides to abjure the pursuit of the bodily desire (Armstrong 1968; Midgley 2002). Such decisions are no different in their form to any kind of thinking about what to do in relation to a range of competing desires – have breakfast now and a bath later or have a bath now and breakfast later! There is no general rule of ethical conduct or of the good life that says it is always better to abjure the bodily desire. Such questions must be considered case by case.
Flat ontologies and the elimination of mind/body dualism
As we have noted, much of the discussion of the problems of mind/body dualism in New Materialist writings follows that of earlier feminist analysis (Plumwood 1993; Lloyd 1984). New Materialism also introduces a number of new arguments against dualism. These are all tied to different aspects of what Fox and Alldred refer to as New Materialist ‘ontology’.
A key aspect of New Materialism has been called a ‘flat ontology’. New Materialism argues that the mind, like the body and other material objects, is ‘material’. All objects are on the same footing, the mind is not constituted as some different kind of substance, in a perpetual condition of observation, looking down from a great height on the material world below. The social, and the mental are ‘not distinct from other materialities’ (Fox & Alldred 2016: 16). This insight is the basis of the name ‘New Materialism’.
The argument of New Materialists begins from the observation that the mind has material effects on material bodies and is itself affected by material bodies (as also in Armstrong 1968).
Thoughts, memories, desires and emotions have material effects. Because thoughts, ideas, memories, feelings, desires, and collective abstractions and ‘constructions’ can all materially affect and be affected by other relations in an assemblage, they can be treated in exactly the same way as other (seemingly more ‘material’) relations. (Fox & Alldred 2016: 25)
So the mind itself must be a material body. We can certainly see how everyday it is to attribute effects on mental states to material bodies and vice versa. For example. ‘Eight days of rain and grey skies had depressed the travellers’. A material event causing a mental event. ‘I decided to catch the train so I went and bought a ticket’. A mental event causing a material event. To embrace this philosophy is to end the mind/body split by treating both as aspects of ‘the material’ world.
For an example of this theory in its application to empirical studies, Ringrose and Rawlings cite the ways in which bullying in schools takes place through interactions between physical objects (such as skirts and hair) and mental objects (discourses). These elements must all figure in an adequate account of bullying incidents.
Rather than privileging either the discursive or the material which have traditionally been posited as dichotomous, we suggest that each of these material elements hold agency. (Ringrose & Rawlings 2015: 101)
Fox and Alldred mention with approval the writings of Connolly and De Landa who argue that what goes on in the social world should be viewed on ‘it’s own terms’ without resorting to explanations that invoke a ‘deeper mechanism or structure’. Consequently, they write,
this monism removes a distinction between a ‘physical’ world of things and bodies and a realm of thoughts, social structures and cultural products (matter vs. mind). (Fox & Alldred 2016: 14)
One way of putting this is to say that ordinary matter along with human actors has ‘agency’.
With this focus upon the materiality of actions, interactions, subjectivities and thoughts, new materialism cuts across a conventional mind/matter dualism (van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2010: 166), not by an anthropocentric privileging of human constructions of ‘reality’, but by recognizing the dynamic, generative and rhizomic production and actualization of the world, in which both matter and meaning play a part. (Fox & Alldred 2016: 26)
Fox and Alldred are right to think it is a mistake to conceive matter and mind as ‘realms’ – suggesting a collection of mental objects or events and a separate collection of physical objects or events. Treating the mind as ‘material’ in the manner of New Materialism makes sense as causal analysis. Going back to the Ringrose and Rawlings study, the stigma of ‘slut’ and the various strategies surrounding that cannot really be understood without taking into account the causal properties of such physical objects as skirts and hair. Mental events (or objects) and physical events (or objects) interact causally to produce social events. Sociological accounts either assume this (as in traditional sociology) or (as in New Materialism) make it explicit.
At the same time, in practice we cannot eliminate the dualism of different theoretical frameworks – mentalist and physicalist. The viewpoint of mind body identity theory is that mentalist and physicalist accounts can be different ways of talking about the same objects and events. Accordingly, we should not be surprised that our thoughts, which are also cellular events in the brain, are affected by events which we find easier to frame in a physicalist way (five days of rain) and vice versa. Ideas and the action of brain cells are one and the same events but interpreted in relation to different theoretical schemas. The dualism here is not a dualism of causal chains operating independently. It is a dualism of interpretive schemes. The causal claims of New Materialism can be quite valid – mental events cause physical happenings and vice versa. Yet this does not thereby eliminate the dualism of different interpretive accounts. I find it confusing to adopt the New Materialist terminology in which mental objects and physical objects are both ‘material’. The reality is that we know very well which kinds of objects can appropriately be understood in a mentalist framework and which cannot. A rock cannot think but a dog does.
One way in which New Materialists argue against this distinction draws from Spinoza (Hardt 2003). Spinoza is credited with the view that the whole world of material objects is infused with spirituality – a pantheism. Mind and body are both aspects of any part of reality. This viewpoint finds a reflection in the quote from Fox and Alldred that speaks of the ongoing productivity of the world in which both ‘matter and meaning play a part’. I doubt whether New Materialism can consistently refuse to recognize duality in this way. For example a rock does not want to go to the bottom of the mountain and cannot be frustrated by the blocking of that desire. It makes sense to attribute mental concepts to some objects and not others. This is a real division in the world, which we are unlikely to fail to notice one way or another.
There is another way of interpreting Spinoza’s claim that may relate to its appearance in New Materialism. A term used by Spinoza is conatus or drive (Hardt 2003). Spinoza claims that all matter possesses conatus – objects operate and act through inner causes. Philosophers frequently talk about this as the attribution of ‘powers’ to objects (Molnar 2003). Powers are causal mechanisms described in terms of the effects that they are likely to produce. So an intention to eat is apt to cause eating behaviour. Brittleness is apt to cause breaking in glass. Weight is apt to cause falling in a stone. Electrical charge is apt to cause repulsion. Spinoza is quite correct, and so are the New Materialists, if they mean that material reality cannot be understood without attributing causal powers to objects. They are right if they think that both mental objects and physical objects have powers. In such a perspective the problem of ‘old materialism’ is that it pretended it could do without such concepts, seeing matter as ‘passive stuff, as raw, brute, or inert’ (Bennett 2010: 12). Whether such a view of things ever dominated the Western tradition is debatable. Certainly some authors and schools of thought have argued that powers have no place in a scientific understanding – Hume, Popper, the Logical Positivists, Behaviourists. But this can hardly be called a dominant view when mainstream science from Newton’s physics through to genetics and chemistry have attributed powers of all kinds.
New Materialism and Relational Ontology
While the conflation of the mental and material in New Materialism may be a bit confusing it is not a huge problem. Accounts of social events will actually go on as before, with mental events claimed as ‘material’ at the same time as they are described in ways that can be understood within older mentalist frameworks. However it may readily be said that the explication of New Materialism given above still treats minds and material bodies as things, as objects which play a part in causing events, affecting each other and so on. Yet what many New Materialist writings argue is that a ‘relational ontology’ such as they propose does not thingify the world.
Why do we think the existence of relationships requires relata? (Barad 2003: 812)
These arguments have been widely taken up as constituting one of the foundations of New Materialism. For New Materialists, objects are not things in the world, which have causal properties, and which last for at least a while. For them, this normal understanding of objects is a kind of essentialism. We are treating these causal properties and the associated continuity as essential properties of the things we are nominating as objects. Instead, what we have called an ‘object’ is in fact an ‘assemblage’ of relationships. It cannot be understood independently of the relationships with which it is involved at any particular moment.
Deleuzo Guattarian materialism regards human bodies and all other material, social and abstract entities as relational, having no ontological status or integrity other than that produced through their relationship to other similarly contingent and ephemeral bodies, things and ideas. (Fox & Alldred 2016: 16)
a relational ontology, in which multiple relations assemble or associate as a consequence of their capacities to affect or be affected. (Fox & Alldred 2016: 26)
for Deleuze the components of an assemblage are not bodies, things and ideas, but the relations between them. (Fox & Bale 2017: 5)
This is a difficult claim to assess. On the one hand, it is certainly true that objects cannot exist independently of their various relationships, they are always formed by relationships with other objects at some time in the past. They are always causally linked to other objects and these linkages explain their current state. Any object can be viewed as a system of parts (also objects) held together in a particular set of relationships to each other. So on this reading of the New Materialist view, an assemblage is just an object that we are not to forget has relationships – ‘a temporarily stable assemblage of coordinated elements’ (Hardt 2003: 94). But this does not make it any less of an object. It is still causally independent of some other objects, contingently related to other objects and with various causal capacities to engage in future and different relationships down the track. In that sense it is still something which has a certain independence and an essence, if you like, that predictably allows it to engage in some kinds of relationships and not others.
But New Materialists constantly urge us against this everyday reading of what they are talking about. There are no objects, only relationships – ‘a body is merely a temporarily stable relationship’ (Hardt 2003: 92). This is so thoroughly ungrammatical as to be inconceivable and unwrite-able. I am in a relationship with my father, the relationship of father and son. That makes sense, we know what that means. But in talking about this I have mentioned two independent, causally effective, objects in the world, myself and my father. It is impossible to conceive what our relationship ‘paternity’ might be without considering those two beings related through it. In other words, objects may well be constituted by relationships but we cannot talk about relationships without talking about objects; there cannot just be ‘relationships’. These grammatical parts are interdependent and mutually necessary for any meaningful dialogue.
According to Barad, what is primary and indivisible in the world are not things at all but relationships expressed in ‘phenomena’. These phenomena are always relations, or events in which a relationship is expressed.
the primary epistemological unit is not independent objects with inherent boundaries and properties but rather phenomena … phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components. That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations – relations without pre-existing relata. (Barad 2003: 815)
As they take place they create what she calls an ‘agential cut’ and for the duration of the event taking place it makes sense to speak of objects.
It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the ‘components’ of phenomena become determinant and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful. (Barad 2003: 815)
For example an axe hits the tree. However the objects so named do not have any independent existence. Their existence is only in reference to this particular relationship. The axe and the tree are not substances and accordingly they cannot have causal powers that make things happen. Instead they come about only in the context of the relationship (the axe hits the tree). There is an indeterminacy in Barad’s view here. On one reading, objects do exist but only for as long as and in so far as they are constituted within a phenomenon that relates them to each other. In another reading, relationships are ‘ontologically primary’ and objects do not really exist – there are relationships ‘without relata’.
Comments on Relational Ontology
One of the things that might urge us to a degree of caution in adopting a relational ontology is the total impossibility of advocating this ontology without contradicting it – referring to objects in the world as though they have an existence independent of the particular relationship that one is considering. Barad attempts to establish relational ontology through Bohr’s understanding of experiments in quantum physics.
A concrete example may be helpful. When light passes through a two-slit diffraction grating and forms a diffraction pattern it is said to exhibit wavelike behavior. But there is also evidence that light exhibits particle-like characteristics, called photons. If one wanted to test this hypothesis, the diffraction apparatus could be modified in such a way as to allow a determination of which slit a given photon passes through (since particles only go through a single slit at a time). The result of running this experiment is that the diffraction pattern is destroyed! Classically, these two results together seem contradictory—frustrating efforts to specify the true ontological nature of light. Bohr resolves this wave-particle duality paradox as follows: the objective referent is not some abstract, independently existing entity but rather the phenomenon of light intra-acting with the apparatus. (Barad 2003: 815)
This passage begins by talking about two types of apparatus for testing ideas about the nature of light. One is a diffraction grating with two slits, the other apparatus allows light to pass only through one slit. The intention of the paragraph is to demonstrate that photons are not real objects but phenomena, something which takes place when light interacts with a measuring apparatus. Yet, leaving photons aside, there are three independently existing objects mentioned in this account. There is light itself, which at a certain point appears after a switch is thrown in the laboratory. Then in front of this pre-existing light, the scientist first places a diffraction grating with two slits. This is the second independent and pre-existing object. Finally there is the apparatus which allows the light to pass through one slit. A third pre-existing object. All three of these objects are described as existing outside of and independent from the particular moment in which two of the three come together for the phenomenon/relationship in question – light passing through two slits or light passing through one slit.
In a relational ontology, what we normally think of as a causal connection based in powers (the power of an axe to cut, the softness of wood) has no foundation in reality. If an ‘axe’ regularly cuts ‘wood’ or if this relationship or something very similar repeats itself, this is not because of causal powers that make such events likely. It is merely an ‘iteration’, meaning a repetition.
Phenomena are constitutive of reality. Reality is not composed of things-in themselves or things-behind-phenomena but “things”-in-phenomena … Because phenomena constitute the ontological primitives, it makes no sense to talk about independently existing things as somehow behind or as the causes of phenomena. In essence, there are no noumena, only phenomena. (Barad 2003: 817)
Matter is a stabilizing and destabilizing process of iterative intra-activity. (Barad 2003: 822)
Intra-actions are causally constraining nondeterministic enactments through which matter-in-the-process-of-becoming is sedimented out and enfolded in further materi-alizations. (Barad 2003: 823)
This relational ontology draws on Butler’s account of gender and expands it to cover literally everything. Butler claims there is no essence of gender, gender is just repeated performance of gender practices. In Barad, there is no reality composed of things. When we talk about things we are just talking about repeated performances of relationships. In fact the philosophical background to this kind of thinking is David Hume’s rejection of the idea of powers in the eighteenth century and his assertion that the concept of cause merely refers to ‘constant conjunction’. According to Hume, the statement, the match lights because it is struck on the match box is just a short hand way of referring to our understanding that events like this are constantly conjoined – striking matches and lighting matches. Relational ontologies take this logic further, dispensing with objects in conjunction altogether – striking and lighting but no matches or matchboxes.
Moira Gatens (first published 1996), advocating an earlier version of this ontology, draws this metaphysics from Spinoza and Deleuze (Hardt 2003). She explains Spinoza’s view of the body as follows:
The body does not have a ‘truth’ or a ‘true’ nature since it is a process and its meaning and capacities will vary according to its context. We do not know the limits of the body or the powers that it is capable of attaining. These limits and capacities can only be revealed by the ongoing interactions of the body and its environment. (Gatens 2003: 57)
The last sentence of Moira Gatens’ quotation contradicts the middle one. If these capacities can be revealed by interactions, then interactions in the past must given us at least some knowledge of the limits of the body. As Fox explains this position:
we cannot predict what a body (or thing or abstract concept) can do until we observe its interactions in a particular assemblage. Second, neither is it possible to predict what an assemblage can do by simply documenting its components, we need to explore relations’ capacities when assembled together and intra-acting. (Fox 2017: 5; see also Gatens 2003; Hardt 2003)
From my perspective, there is much that is true in these quotations but they are equally and obviously wrong in some fundamental ways. I may not know whether I can learn to play the guitar like Jimi Hendrix. But I cannot breathe under water. None of these objects and their capacities are unknown to the point where I am completely at a loss in predicting the outcome.
The view that objects are made by their relationships is true up to a point but there are many exceptions. While a relationship may impact one party it does not necessarily impact both. I am digging up a Roman vicus. My excavation is not having a great deal of impact on the vicus two thousand years before. I look at a doorknob. My observation is not changing the doorknob, it goes on being the same doorknob that it was before I looked at it. In other words, our observation of things does not necessarily affect reality, though it may in some cases. More generally, relationships may take place which do not have a particularly strong effect on an object – meaning that its independent existence, the one that preceded the relationship, goes on. I pick up the orange and look at it before replacing it in the bowl. Or in other cases they may markedly change the object – for example if we eat the orange rather than merely observing it.
While it may be possible to entertain a relational ontology in programmatic statements, it is difficult to implement it in the everyday practice of writing about social life. As a result, New Materialist authors constantly revert to more everyday forms of speech, talking about people as real objects in the world, whose really existing thoughts are formed contingently in relationships with other real objects and contingently have various impacts. In other words, like the rest of us, they speak about assemblages as though they were objects independent of the observations we make about them.
Relational Ontology and Mind/Body Dualism
How does this relational ontology transcend mind/body dualism? In a relational ontology, objects in the world that last and have causal powers are either not admitted as real at all – or at most are seen as existing in only temporary configurations in the context of a particular event and the relationships associated with that. So, for example, the statement, ‘Torrential rains weakened the hillside and caused a landslide’, makes no sense in a relational ontology. This problematic statement assumes that ‘torrential rains’ is an object in the world with certain causal powers of the kind that might weaken a hillside (a second object in the world also with causal powers). In a relational ontology the event ‘a landslide’ just happens and creates a once-off assemblage of rains, landslide and hillside. By analogy, the statement ‘John wanted a sandwich and got up from the chair’ assumes the desire to make a sandwich as a causal power of John’s mind, responsible for an event – getting up – which is an effect on John’s material body. Such objects and their powers cannot exist in a relational ontology. Mind/body dualism is transcended because the concepts of mind and body alike are concepts of substances, of objects, which have particular properties which can account for their behaviour in a variety of context. For example my thumb and fingers are opposed and can grip; my mind feels pain if I place my hand on a hot stove. However no such entities are permitted in a relational ontology. Barad summarizes this argument.
the claim that cultural practices produce material bodies starts with the metaphysical presumption of the ontological distinction of the former set from the latter. (Barad 2003: 825)
In other words, because mind and body are not ontologically distinct, there can be no mind/body split. They are aspects of the one thing; the phenomenon of mind body ‘intra-action’. So there can be no body independent of mind. This conclusion becomes a subset of a more general claim that ‘objects’ as such do not exist, only relationships.
Relational ontology as a relativism
This argument has a peculiar consequence, because it ends up by putting New Materialism in the same camp as the social constructionists. In some interpretations of Foucault’s writings, it is argued that regimes of truth are socially constructed and that nothing is actually true. All claims to truth are relative to a particular social construction of the truth. New Materialists consistently distance themselves from this position and yet they end up making similar claims as a result of their relational ontology. The material world is always the material world as we have conceived it at any particular point in time. Rendering this more carefully in terms of New Materialist ways of speaking, the material world and our thoughts about it constitute various assemblages of relationships, not relationships between things of course but relationships with other assemblages of relationships and so on.
One way of putting this argument is encapsulated in the following logic. All objects (assemblages) are constituted by their relationships so objects can never ‘precede’ their relationships. Accordingly, objects cannot have an independent existence which we may perceive either correctly or not as the case may be. As Coleman cites Barad’s position, whereas:
interaction assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action. (Barad 2007: 33, cited by Coleman 2014: 11)
This argument is used to show that there can be no objects prior to our conception of them, the context in which our relationship to objects takes place. Barad’s argument, and that of those who follow this logic, turns on a particular reading of which relationships we think constitute an assemblage. A simple refutation is as follows. Let us look at researcher A and their object of study B. If A and B are constituted as assemblages with certain specific causal powers before they meet up and form a relationship, then A and B have preceded that relationship. So, as Barad is using this terminology, the phrase, ‘constituted by their relationships’ cannot mean, constituted by what may have happened to form them in the past. No, it must mean, constituted by this particular relationship between the human and their object of study. Before that they have no real existence. And, I might add, after that they have no further real existence either.
The view suggested by New Materialism is hard to reconcile with our typical understandings of the world. Think of an orange, constituted by a DNA that relates it to its wild ancestors and its ancient cultivators, an object that is situated in relation to gravity, an object related to the market place, to its tree and so on. Yet despite and because of all that, it is an object and these relationships have constituted it with causal properties that are ongoing (at least for a certain period). In many passages New Materialists would be the first to concede this and exclaim with triumph that ‘affects’ come out of relationships and equip assemblages with causal powers (capacities)! However in relationship to Barad’s argument, they are not so hasty. The orange is constituted by its relationship to the person who is perceiving it (and vice versa). On Tuesday the orange is in a relationship with us and is constituted by our relationship to it. On Monday there can be no orange and no us to perceive it, to precede our relationship, because there is no orange independent of this relationship with us on Tuesday. So there can be no mind (us perceiving it) and body (the material orange) split.
In our typical everyday thinking, we well know that the fact that we are now in a relationship with an object does not show that the item in question was not in existence before this relationship took place. We know that it would have been perfectly possible for me and the orange to continue our merry ways without ever coming into contact and consequently, to be independent of the relationship we had on Tuesday – but might not have had.
The independence of reality and our views of it is confirmed in a vast array of ordinary understandings. Dinosaurs really roamed the earth in the Jurassic even though people in the seventeenth century were not aware of this. The earth was round even in the periods of history when people thought it was flat. And so on. This is just simple realism. In other words, it normally never gives us a moment’s pause to think that an object preceded our perception of it.
One way that Barad puts this argument is to say that material reality is already always discursive.
The relationship between the material and the discursive is one of mutual entailment. Neither is articulated/articulable in the absence of the other; matter and meaning are mutually articulated. Neither discursive practices nor material phenomena are ontologically or epistemologically prior. (Barad 2003: 822)
Since in a relational ontology there are only relationships and events in which relationships take place, the material world is always inextricably bound to our perception of it. For example Barad calls the view which she opposes ‘representationalism’ and describes it as
the belief in the ontological distinction between representations and that which they purport to represent; in particular, that which is represented is held to be independent of all practices of representing. (Barad 2003: 804)
According to Barad, we need to go beyond this framework. Latour, one of the founders of what has become the New Materialism cites Boyle’s Law of the behaviour of gases. According to Latour this law does not tell us anything about the behaviour of gases outside of our observation of them. Such ‘things’ and their ‘interactions’ and ‘powers’ do not really exist. Instead the law refers to the behaviour of gases in the context of experimental situations which measure the behaviour of gases. So the behaviour of gases is relative to the scientific processes which attempt to establish the nature of this behaviour. It does not have any independent reality. ‘Boyle and his countless successors go on and on constructing Nature artificially and stating that they are discovering it … [they] are also fabricating these laws [of Nature] in the laboratory’ (Latour 1993: 31). In Barad’s language, there is an agential cut which gives a once at a time meaning to the idea of gases and the idea of a measuring instrument for gases, and the idea of our readings of this measuring instrument. In this logic, there is literally no material world outside our perceptions of it. Such an interpretation implies that New Materialism is an extreme relativism, reality is only meaningful in the context of our various interpretations of it.
This interpretation of Barad is common in the writings of those who cite her to explain the New Materialist perspective. As Fox and Alldred explain this, Barad argues
for a view of the world that is always physically and socioculturally contextual, and which therefore must take account of the part observers or researchers play in its production. (Fox & Alldred 2016: 18)
Accordingly, the material object and our observation exists as an ‘assemblage’ of ‘relationships’, and no item in such an assemblage can be considered outside of its relationship to other items, since all items are conceived of as constituted by their relationships.
As Barad (1996) has shown, human observers are ineluctably caught up in the actions they attempt to describe and explain, and rather than bemoaning a failure of objectivity, from a new materialist perspective, this reveals how thoughts, desires and interpretations are part of the on-going production of materiality. (Fox & Alldred 2016: 26)
As this is put by Ringrose and Rawlings,
our concepts and research ‘apparatuses’, as she [Barad] calls them, create the very phenomena and matter that we seek to study. We create phenomena through our intra-action with them. (2015: 87)
If this is truly the case, then whatever assemblage of reality we have postulated at any point in time is only valid relative to the mental construction of that reality and vanishes at the point where those thoughts are absent from the assemblage. Objects could never free themselves from that assemblage and go wandering off to make a new assemblage – their essence is their assemblage as an event made up of relationships.
It would be a mistake to think that all those who write as New Materialists subscribe to the relativism that has been imputed above. Budgeon, arguing for a New Materialist abandonment of the mind body distinction, draws the line at this constructionist interpretation. Referring to problems she sees in Butler’s work, she suggests that her argument can be end up with the claim that bodies are ‘constituted’ by signification ¬– that is, by a mental process.
A second strategy for bringing materiality back in to feminist analyses of the subject has been to explore and demystify the ways in which practices of signification claim to represent bodies that, in actuality, these very practices work to constitute. The ontological status given to the body, therefore, is a constitutive effect. (Budgeon 2003: 41)
By implication, if bodies are constituted by our different ways of representing them, they are as variable as the different theories we dream up. There is no reality of bodies which we may or may not perceive correctly. Budgeon then goes on to critique this position, citing Colebrook. It may be that bodies can only be conceived of in terms of a discourse (representation) but that does not make them an effect of that discourse. Worse, one can end up with the conclusion that significations coming from patriarchal society are inscribed directly onto women’s bodies – constituting them. Such an approach does not leave any room for the agency of women responding to media images. Concluding this discussion, Budgeon leaves us wondering how New Materialism is to end the mind body distinction without falling into this trap.
The problem remains of how to undertake an analysis of female embodiment and subjectivity that can transcend a mind/body dualism and acknowledge an irreducibility between mind and body, subject and object, culture and nature and so forth. (Budgeon 2003: 42)
Indeed.
‘Discursive’ re-defined
Barad herself is ambivalent about the relativist reading of her discussion and suggests a different reading of the phrase – all material reality is already discursive. A discourse is something which affects boundaries, making and unmaking the world in different ways.
In other words, materiality is discursive (i.e., material phenomena are inseparable from the apparatuses of bodily production: matter emerges out of and includes as part of its being the ongoing reconfiguring of boundaries), just as discursive practices are always already material (i.e., they are ongoing material (re)configurings of the world). (Barad 2003: 822)
On an agential realist account, discursive practices are not human-based activities but rather specific material (re)configurings of the world through which local determinations of boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted.(Barad 2003: 828)
In this reading materiality is always ‘discursive’ because it consists of events and relationships in which boundaries are made and re-made. To be blunt, the discursive is just all the occasions on which things happen. The ‘discursive’ is not about what humans think about and do with their thoughts, or at least this is only a small part of it. This argument is reinforced by the reminder that humans and their thoughts are not real as substances anyway, they are only provisionally brought into existence in the context of particular events and the relationships occasioned by those events. What this broadening of the concept of discourse does is bring us back to some of the key ideas of New Materialism. Mind and body are not different substances because both are ‘material’. Or, mind and body are not different substances because there are no substances as such, only relationships ‘without relata’. These views have been considered above.
Conclusions
These, then are the arguments against mind/body dualism that New Materialism introduces to this discussion. As you can see, this a metaphysical reasoning. It attacks the mind/body split in terms of the way the split offends against the concept of objects as assemblages of relationships. I find it a dubious argument, partly because of my problems with the attempt to dispense with objects and re-cast the world as assemblages of relationships. But it is also dubious in the way it argues that assemblages are always momentarily constituted by the presence of an observer and unthinkable outside that particular context. This is in fact a very old argument for relativism, going back to Berkeley, that has been dressed in new clothes with talk of quantum physics and assemblages.
As the reader may now be aware, the simple phrase ‘mind/body dualism’ can mean a vast variety of different things. The feminist and environmentalist critique of mind body dualism lays the ground for new materialist ontology as the solution to political problems in the Western tradition. The effect is to promote a difficult ontology that promises to transcend ‘mind/body’ dualism once and for all. Novices in this field of scholarship struggle to use the terminology appropriately, without falling into the trap of sounding ridiculous. Experts gate-keep this complex verbiage as editors, reviewers, supervisors and examiners, performing distinction and social closure. There is a massive amount of work tied up in these exercises, with the careful re-writing of sociological investigations within the framework of a very counter-intuitive metaphysics. Like other sociological philosophies before it, New Materialism acts as a millstone around the neck.
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