Interesting project! I'm not an expert on New Materialism, so offhand, my question would be whether it has room for a less "substantial" version of the subject, that is (following Zizek's interpretation of Kant and Hegel)--What if the subject is not a thing but a difference between judging / intending and acting in any agent that has intentions and is able to make judgments?
Given human agents, I think the following must hold true, even for New Materialists: (1) agents have incomplete knowledge and must make decisions based on speculation, (2) agents cannot fully predict the consequences of their own actions, and (3) agents cannot predict how their actions will be interpreted by other agents.
I suspect that this might be all you need to get a Hegelian account of contradiction going, but I wonder if some kind of Deleuzian bias against "negativity" would rule out even an account of contradiction at this level for New Materialists?
Anyway, supposing contradiction at this level is accepted by New Materialists, then perhaps they already have the resources to account for a vast amount of "self-contradiction" on the part of human agents, especially if one takes into account that the demands on the subject are themselves self-contradictory: that is, social compulsions constantly forces people into double bind situations where they have to engage in contradictory and self-undermining behavior.
For instance, if Marx's account of the worker's structural position is correct, without resorting to any theory of the subject, one can account for the fact that worker's MUST have something like a death drive because when they work they act against their own interests and long term survival, but they MUST work in order to survive. Similarly, capitalists want the global economy to continue functioning so that they can keep making profits, but it is their own activity as they compete with each other that leads to global economic crises, which may even lead to financial ruin for some capitalists.
Ultimately the question here would be whether it what extent contradiction might appear in an immanent critique of New Materialism even if it doesn't assume some kind of ontology of the subject with a death-drive. In terms of theory and arguments, the question for me would then be: Is it really necessary to explicitly argue for the subject or for psychoanalytic concepts like death-drive, in order for a position like New Materialism to account for the "contradictions, impulses, and compulsive repetition that frequently characterize human behavior", or could we arrive there starting from premises a New Materialist would accept?
This is a fantastic question! To be honest, there probably are new materialists who would categorically deny that they've abandoned subjectivity, or who subscribe the "less substantial" version of subjectivity you're outlining here.
That said, one of the core commitments animating a lot of new materialist thought is a radical decoupling of agency from intentionality, heavily influenced by Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory. It's a bit counterintuitive, but they're defining "agency" in a way that has very little to do with decision-making. Instead, agency is something that emerges from a dynamic assemblage of human and non-human actors.
A common example is a speed bump. A speed bump does not make a decision, but it still acts - it forces you to slow down. Agency is not located in the speed bump itself. It emerges as the expression of a material constellation of human and non-human actors, which include roads, signs, traffic lights, drivers, vehicles, city planners, traffic laws, etc. Human decision-making doesn't disappear. But in the context of a flat ontology that does not distinguish between the agency of humans, non-humans, and objects, those decisions aren't very salient either.
The upshot of all this is it gives us a very useful way of talking about things that aren't human, but still seem capable of acting independently (algorithms, artificial intelligence, etc.). Better still, we can describe their actions without any risk of anthropomorphizing them. This is why new materialism shows up in so many conversations about digital rhetoric. And to be honest, that's largely how I've used it in the past.
However, there's also a huge downside: we no longer have any ONTOLOGICAL criteria for distinguishing between humans, non-humans, and objects. On some level, this is precisely the point of their theoretical project: to blur these metaphysical boundaries. Many new materialists are deeply invested in critiquing anthropocentrism, and a flat ontology is a pretty compelling response to a hierarchical "Great Chain of Being" that positions humans at the top and non-human life at the bottom.
But this is where I think the theory runs into trouble. There IS something that separates humans from animals, objects, and non-human agents like AI: the unconscious. Animals do not pursue satisfaction at the expense of their survival. AI does not sabotage itself. Only humans are capable of acting against their own survival, because only humans are caught in structures of desire they can't access at the level of consciousness.
So, I agree with you: we can describe contradictory behavior with structural analysis. I think this is the role of ideology critique, a la Zižek. But this only works up to a certain point. What psychoanalysis adds is a way of understanding how contradiction is not just imposed from the outside (via social structures) but internalized by the (human) subject and enjoyed.
Todd McGowan's "Capitalism and Desire" is a great book that addresses topic. He also has a pretty great YouTube channel where he's probably going into this in more detail.
Thanks so much for your thoughtful comment! This is exactly the kind of stuff I'm excited to be thinking about again.
Yeah I love where you are going. As an aside, I'm aware of the contradiction as ontology reading of Hegel via McGowan but I'm not very convinced by it (I see hints of Platonism). I personally have been most inspired by J M Bernstein's freely available lectures on Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit". Ultimately, I'm skeptical of transhistorical accounts of contradiction and the subject on Hegelian / Marxist grounds, as tending to represent forms of immediacy and not grasping the complexity of historical contradiction (denying the possibility of movement to the concept of contradiction itself, staying on the level of abstraction instead of seeing how different determinate, historical forms of contradiction develop in different societies).
Side note, Ray Brassier is a really interesting thinker, and you might want to take a look at his 2014 critique of flat ontology "Deleveling: Against ‘Flat Ontologies’", which examines the premises of flat ontology from more of an analytic point of view (drawing particularly from Wilfred Sellars): https://philpapers.org/rec/BRADAF
A relevant excerpt:
"Epistemic subjectivity is ineliminable, but it is neither supernatural nor immutable. It embodies a mutable conceptual structure embedded in the natural order. Concepts change over time because the way in which we know the world is conditioned by the way in which the world changes....
The distinction between reality and appearance is ... required in order to make sense of the idea of cognitive progress. Cognitive progress consists in integrating knowledge about the structure of representing acts into represented content. This is an interesting way of naturalizing Hegel’s account of the spiral of absolute knowing: over the course of our cognitive history, we incorporate more and more facts about representing into represented facts."
Interesting project! I'm not an expert on New Materialism, so offhand, my question would be whether it has room for a less "substantial" version of the subject, that is (following Zizek's interpretation of Kant and Hegel)--What if the subject is not a thing but a difference between judging / intending and acting in any agent that has intentions and is able to make judgments?
Given human agents, I think the following must hold true, even for New Materialists: (1) agents have incomplete knowledge and must make decisions based on speculation, (2) agents cannot fully predict the consequences of their own actions, and (3) agents cannot predict how their actions will be interpreted by other agents.
I suspect that this might be all you need to get a Hegelian account of contradiction going, but I wonder if some kind of Deleuzian bias against "negativity" would rule out even an account of contradiction at this level for New Materialists?
Anyway, supposing contradiction at this level is accepted by New Materialists, then perhaps they already have the resources to account for a vast amount of "self-contradiction" on the part of human agents, especially if one takes into account that the demands on the subject are themselves self-contradictory: that is, social compulsions constantly forces people into double bind situations where they have to engage in contradictory and self-undermining behavior.
For instance, if Marx's account of the worker's structural position is correct, without resorting to any theory of the subject, one can account for the fact that worker's MUST have something like a death drive because when they work they act against their own interests and long term survival, but they MUST work in order to survive. Similarly, capitalists want the global economy to continue functioning so that they can keep making profits, but it is their own activity as they compete with each other that leads to global economic crises, which may even lead to financial ruin for some capitalists.
Ultimately the question here would be whether it what extent contradiction might appear in an immanent critique of New Materialism even if it doesn't assume some kind of ontology of the subject with a death-drive. In terms of theory and arguments, the question for me would then be: Is it really necessary to explicitly argue for the subject or for psychoanalytic concepts like death-drive, in order for a position like New Materialism to account for the "contradictions, impulses, and compulsive repetition that frequently characterize human behavior", or could we arrive there starting from premises a New Materialist would accept?
This is a fantastic question! To be honest, there probably are new materialists who would categorically deny that they've abandoned subjectivity, or who subscribe the "less substantial" version of subjectivity you're outlining here.
That said, one of the core commitments animating a lot of new materialist thought is a radical decoupling of agency from intentionality, heavily influenced by Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory. It's a bit counterintuitive, but they're defining "agency" in a way that has very little to do with decision-making. Instead, agency is something that emerges from a dynamic assemblage of human and non-human actors.
A common example is a speed bump. A speed bump does not make a decision, but it still acts - it forces you to slow down. Agency is not located in the speed bump itself. It emerges as the expression of a material constellation of human and non-human actors, which include roads, signs, traffic lights, drivers, vehicles, city planners, traffic laws, etc. Human decision-making doesn't disappear. But in the context of a flat ontology that does not distinguish between the agency of humans, non-humans, and objects, those decisions aren't very salient either.
The upshot of all this is it gives us a very useful way of talking about things that aren't human, but still seem capable of acting independently (algorithms, artificial intelligence, etc.). Better still, we can describe their actions without any risk of anthropomorphizing them. This is why new materialism shows up in so many conversations about digital rhetoric. And to be honest, that's largely how I've used it in the past.
However, there's also a huge downside: we no longer have any ONTOLOGICAL criteria for distinguishing between humans, non-humans, and objects. On some level, this is precisely the point of their theoretical project: to blur these metaphysical boundaries. Many new materialists are deeply invested in critiquing anthropocentrism, and a flat ontology is a pretty compelling response to a hierarchical "Great Chain of Being" that positions humans at the top and non-human life at the bottom.
But this is where I think the theory runs into trouble. There IS something that separates humans from animals, objects, and non-human agents like AI: the unconscious. Animals do not pursue satisfaction at the expense of their survival. AI does not sabotage itself. Only humans are capable of acting against their own survival, because only humans are caught in structures of desire they can't access at the level of consciousness.
So, I agree with you: we can describe contradictory behavior with structural analysis. I think this is the role of ideology critique, a la Zižek. But this only works up to a certain point. What psychoanalysis adds is a way of understanding how contradiction is not just imposed from the outside (via social structures) but internalized by the (human) subject and enjoyed.
Todd McGowan's "Capitalism and Desire" is a great book that addresses topic. He also has a pretty great YouTube channel where he's probably going into this in more detail.
Thanks so much for your thoughtful comment! This is exactly the kind of stuff I'm excited to be thinking about again.
Yeah I love where you are going. As an aside, I'm aware of the contradiction as ontology reading of Hegel via McGowan but I'm not very convinced by it (I see hints of Platonism). I personally have been most inspired by J M Bernstein's freely available lectures on Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit". Ultimately, I'm skeptical of transhistorical accounts of contradiction and the subject on Hegelian / Marxist grounds, as tending to represent forms of immediacy and not grasping the complexity of historical contradiction (denying the possibility of movement to the concept of contradiction itself, staying on the level of abstraction instead of seeing how different determinate, historical forms of contradiction develop in different societies).
Side note, Ray Brassier is a really interesting thinker, and you might want to take a look at his 2014 critique of flat ontology "Deleveling: Against ‘Flat Ontologies’", which examines the premises of flat ontology from more of an analytic point of view (drawing particularly from Wilfred Sellars): https://philpapers.org/rec/BRADAF
A relevant excerpt:
"Epistemic subjectivity is ineliminable, but it is neither supernatural nor immutable. It embodies a mutable conceptual structure embedded in the natural order. Concepts change over time because the way in which we know the world is conditioned by the way in which the world changes....
The distinction between reality and appearance is ... required in order to make sense of the idea of cognitive progress. Cognitive progress consists in integrating knowledge about the structure of representing acts into represented content. This is an interesting way of naturalizing Hegel’s account of the spiral of absolute knowing: over the course of our cognitive history, we incorporate more and more facts about representing into represented facts."