A RECENT TREND IN THE HUMANITIES: THE NEW MATERIALISMS AS PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY (original) (raw)

2020, Theory and Research in Social, Human and Administrative Sciences II (Cilt 2)

Abstract

The New Materialisms is a theory that has its origins in theoretical physics. Its aim is to create awareness about the entanglements of humans and the more-than-human worlds so that humans will act more cautiously towards the environment and will likely include ontology and ethics in their process of scientific knowledge production. This recent theoretical and sociological field of inquiry, “The New Materialisms”, has been intensely explored since 1990 and prominent scholars from various disciplines such as Karen Barad, Susan Hekman, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, David Abram, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Vicky Kirby, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost support the idea that anthropocentric exceptionalism must be abandoned since no entity, animate or inanimate, can be deemed superior to another. Agency, which has long been thought to belong only to humans, is evenly distributed to all that is made of matter, so they are ontologically independent and do not need human consciousness or interpretation to exist. The New Materialisms is against any kind of speciesism. Concordantly, the idea is to emphasize the necessity to understand the connection, the interaction, or intra-action in Barad’s words, and interdependence arising from the symbiosis in order to facilitate the continuity of the ecosystems whose destruction means the destruction of the human species along with the nonhuman environment. Within the framework of this theory, there is a “material turn” (2010: 7), as Alaimo puts it in her work; namely, there is an inclination to equalize the importance of the ontology of humans with that of nonhuman bodies (2010: 2). According to New Materialists, neither is superior in terms of agency. Therefore, the theory provides a fresh and dynamic way of interpretation to academic disciplines such as philosophy, social sciences, history, anthropology, literature and theology holding the potential to change the traditional mind-set. It facilitates the rethinking the relationship between nature and culture as nature-cultures. Moreover, New Materialisms is especially popular in literature as a medium of interpreting literary texts in terms of human and nonhuman intra-action.

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