Nor do they appeal to the strictly “flat ontology” of the speculative realists, according to whom “everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example.” Like the new materialists, the speculative realists (especially those on the “object-oriented” branch) seek to unsettle philosophy’s traditional privilege of the human but reject what they call “process relationalism” insofar as it privileges “alliances” over entities, “couplings” over objects, and motion over rest. Demanding a theory of “sharp, specific units,” these thinkers proclaim the ontological equality of every discrete thing.
For the new materialists, by contrast, ontology is “monolithic but multiply tiered”; in other words, things are not simply “equal” because things are not “things” in the first place. Rather, things—actual entities—are multiplicities, assemblages, hybrids, resonance machines, sonority clusters, intra-actions, complexities, and viscous porosities—all terms that variously express the insight that each cell, organism, vegetable, and photon is irreducibly composed of what Karen Barad would call an “intra-active” host of others.
The “new materialisms” currently coursing through cultural, feminist, political, and queer theories seek to displace human privilege by attending to the agency of matter itself.
Far from being passive or inert, they argue, matter acts, creates, destroys, and transforms—and, thus, is more of a process than a thing.
Calling as they do on the insights of quantum mechanics, general relativity, complexity theory, and non- linear biology to theorize matter as mattering, these thinkers work against much of what is often denigrated as “mere” materialism
Taking cues from Whitehead, Deleuze and Guattari, Stengers and Prigogine, and Margulis and Sagan, the new materialists mobilize a revivified materiality against such toxic materialisms. They accomplish this in part by rejecting traditional ontological hierarchies—especially those that seek clear distinctions between spirit and matter, life and nonlife, or sentience and non-sentience.
It is not just that we are entangled in matter—we subjects who read, write, and ruminate on what “we” are. We are materializations entangled in other materializations; we happen in our mattering.