Introduction
Across the social sciences and humanities, a new wave of thinking has become apparent, one focused on what is described as the ‘new materialism’, and which is orientated by a ‘post-humanist’ perspective. The success of this approach (or approaches) has been widespread and is marked by a general concern to decentre the human from its hitherto pivotal role in social understanding (Gamble et al. Reference Gamble, Hanan and Nail2019). Within social gerontology and ageing studies, too, several recent interventions have been made, advocating for such a new materialist approach, Their aim in developing ‘a new materialist-inspired understanding of aging processes’ is, in the words of Grit Höppner and Monika Urban, ‘to reconstruct the material-discursive co-production of aging processes … deployed as mutual entanglements of materiality and meaning as well as of humans and non-human agency’ (Höppner and Urban Reference Höppner and Urban2018: 1). The proponents of this new materialist turn seek to extend their critical approach to ageing studies by including material objects and their entanglements within social relations, in their purview. This position has been further developed by Gallistl et al. (Reference Gallistl, Hahmann, Höppner and Wanka2024: 1):
While materialities – of aging bodies, care technologies, or spatial arrangements of care – have always played a vital role in the constitution of age and aging, gerontology’s conceptual and methodological engagement with issues surrounding materiality only started recently. In an effort to expand dominant biomedical models of aging, social, critical, and cultural gerontology have long conceptualized aging as a social experience, stressing the importance of social discourses and narratives in the construction of aging or highlighting social inequalities that shape unequal experiences and outcomes of aging, largely neglecting materialities as a topic of gerontology.
The shared enterprise in this focus on materialities also implies what Lupton calls ‘a more than human’ orientation (Lupton Reference Lupton2024) whereby previous human-centric orientations are superseded by actively exploring the cultures, practices and materialities of ageing. This, she believes, can lead to a ‘gerontology of everything’ that considers not only how humans age together with or alongside non-humans but also the connections that exist between human and other non-human living things, ecosystems and microbiomes. It is at this point that an explicit connection between the new materialism and post-humanism starts to emerge. Cozza and Wanka (Reference Cozza and Wanka2024) state: ‘Leveraging a posthumanist view on aging can then enable us to explore multispecies forms of solidarities and material entanglements within large infrastructures and complex ecologies we – humans – inhabit together with nonhumans and more-than-humans’ (Cozza and Wanka Reference Cozza and Wanka2024: 1).
This move away from conventional humanist positions regarding human ageing acknowledges that this might seem to be diminishing humans qua humans, effectively denying the ethical status of humans by locating them as just parts of more complex assemblages. Taking this charge head-on, these writers counter this by claiming that what they are proposing is not an oppositional ethics ‘but rather an ethics of relationships’. They go on to state: ‘We should care about what happens “in-between” and how this intra-action affects and is affected by the parties involved’ (Cozza and Wanka Reference Cozza and Wanka2024: 1). Adopting this stance, they argue that the move to studying assemblages from a posthumanist perspective not only provides a deeper understanding of ageing but is also emancipatory in reflecting a desire to break away from conventional human-centric ontologies towards a richer, more complex view of ageing. It is this combination of ontological critique and ethical challenge that we wish to take issue with in this article. We argue that a gerontology centred on human uniqueness is more appropriate than the proposed post-humanist, new materialist approaches being advocated – both in the claims of such studies to focus on human ageing and in providing a directly relevant body of knowledge of what matters most about human ageing. While the non-human world and the manifestations of ageing evident in that world are not to be denied, we hold that a better understanding of what is distinctly human about human ageing should retain its priority both in the sciences and in the humanities.
Post-humanism and the new materialism in social gerontology and ageing studies
As noted, the move towards the post-humanist or new materialist turn within the field of ageing studies and social gerontology has many recent advocates (Andrews and Duff Reference Andrews and Duff2019; Cluley et al. Reference Cluley, Fox and Radnor2023; Fletcher Reference Fletcher2023; Gallistl et al. Reference Gallistl, Hahmann, Höppner and Wanka2024; Leibing and Katz Reference Leibing and Katz2024). A major motivation for this development has been to challenge ‘the ideology of human exceptionalism’, seeing human lives as simply part of a wider set of non-hierarchical ‘objects relations’ (Jenkins Reference Jenkins, Ward and Sandberg2023: 73).
Rather like the term ‘new materialism’, post-humanism is itself something of a generic term. Both represent a diversity of ways of reorienting research in the humanities and social sciences, away from their anthropocentric standpoints and towards a recognition of a ‘flattened’ world of entangled assemblages. According to Rosi Braidotti, a key post-humanist thinker, ‘the post-human predicament enforces the necessity to think again and to think harder about the status of human subjectivity and the ethical relations, norms and values that may be worthy of the complexity of our times’ (Braidotti Reference Braidotti, Banerji and Paranjape2016: 13). Going further, Quinn and Blandon argue that post-humanist theory moves away from the articulate human ‘self’ to focus on acts and bodies, on materiality and on the agency of things (Quinn and Blandon Reference Quinn and Blandon2017: 585). Consequently, while post-humanism may be itself an umbrella term covering several differently nuanced positions, within the fields of social gerontology and ageing studies, it constitutes a specific relationship to epistemology and ontology.
Post-humanism: its epistemological framework
According to the philosopher Francesca Ferrando, post-humanism is ‘a “post” to the notion of the “human”, located within the historical occurrence of “humanism” … and in an uncritical acceptance of “anthropocentrism”’ (Ferrando Reference Ferrando2020: 240, italics by the authors). Originating as a critique of the inherent dichotomies of ‘human’ versus ‘non-human’ and the modernist elevation of ‘human-ness’ over other, lesser forms labelled ‘sub-human’, ‘inhuman’, ‘not quite-human’ or simply ‘non-human’, post-humanism collapses all such distinctions. In its various iterations, there is an intermingling of all lifeforms in a shared planetary being, the relative dissolution of all ‘Enlightenment’-based distinctions between living and non-living matter, and between society and nature (as in the new materialism). Emblematic of this turn, post-humanist gerontologists demand that we ‘look … to the non-human and “more than human” aspects of ageing’ (Andrews and Duff Reference Andrews and Duff2019: 46). One aspect of this kind of approach is concerned with the possibilities arising from technological interventions affecting, modifying and enhancing bodily and psychological functioning in chronologically old human beings – making them ‘more than human’ and by implication rendering their agedness ‘less aged’. A related development has been the reinvigoration of ‘neo-vitalism’, a school of thought that goes back well over a century. To this we now turn.
Neo-vitalism and ontology
Neo-vitalism is the contemporary version of an approach that maintained that an essential difference exists between living and non-living things, represented by what Henri Bergson called the ‘elan vitale’ (Bergson Reference Bergson and Mitchell1907) and Hans Driesch called ‘entelechy’ (Driesch Reference Driesch1926). Here the emphasis is on a shared existence amongst all living matter, which Ariew and de Silva (Reference Ariew and de Silva2022) have recently argued supports the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis whereby the planet Earth is seen as evolving as a lifeform, such that its atmosphere, geology, flora and fauna constitute a living whole (Lovelock Reference Lovelock1990; Lovelock and Margulis Reference Lovelock and Margulis1974). Since then, neo-vitalism has received a further boost, both within the post-humanist literature and within biology itself through notions of ‘methodological vitalism’ (Walsh Reference Walsh, Nicholson and Dupré2018) and a focus on ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett Reference Bennett2010).
Going beyond this emphasis on ecological wholeness, Monica Greco has argued that vitalism is now important only ‘to the extent that it can be reconciled with the notion that there is no fundamental difference between living and non-living beings’ (Greco Reference Greco2021: 58). In making this leap, Greco argues that such vitalism reflects not so much a theory but an ethos, an ethos based on a sensitivity to nature as a whole, its essential ‘underdeterminancy’ that ‘acknowledge[s] the importance of our imaginaries and our desires as ingredients in the becoming of nature itself’ (Greco Reference Greco2021: 63). Within this pan-ethical framework, Greco suggests that ageing and death are ‘irreducibly real [but] as the ebb and flow of becoming, instead of being … clandestine occurrence[s] with no right of existence in our experience’ (Greco Reference Greco2021: 64).Footnote 1 This position contrasts with more biologically oriented neo-vitalists such as Walsh who argue for a clear separation between the openness (or agency) of lifeforms and the ‘objectcy’ of non-living objects which ‘take their definitive properties from their material constitution’ (Walsh Reference Walsh, Nicholson and Dupré2018: 168). While the former exists as, and through, ‘change’ (their agency), the latter exist in their unchangingness or objectcy. Ageing, it could be said, is realized as change within the living agent: non-living objects, on the other hand, age only when looked at through the human lens of chronology.
In her book Vibrant Matter, the political theorist Jane Bennett takes a rather different view, although she admits that her own ‘fabulously vital materiality … is so close to their (Bergson’s and Driesch’s) vitalism’ (Bennett Reference Bennett2010: 63). By this she means that she shares with those writers a ‘common foe’ in the epistemology of a deterministic materialism in understanding the world. In her advocacy of this notion of ‘lively matter’, Bennett comes close to adopting the position espoused by the sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour and his equivalizing of all matter into a mass of ‘actants’ caught up in ‘events’. While her position may be close to that of Latour, she maintains a reluctance to abandon her own identification with being human, and aligns her interests not exclusively but more so with human interests than those of other non-human, non-communicating others. Her suggestion is that if the goal is to increase or enhance responsivity and receptivity to other non-human interests, a start might most usefully be made by attending more closely to ‘the voices of excluded humans’ (Bennett Reference Bennett2010: 104).
To open up to Bennett’s vibrant matter, to be able to express a neo-vitalist ethos, demands a point of reference. In that sense, the human serves Bennett as just such a starting point. By implication, selecting human ageing as a starting point for a concern with ageing follows the same logic, a common logic with a common form of communication. Despite a shared existence as ‘lively matter’, it is not clear that the neo-vitalist approach constitutes quite the post-humanist position associated with the neo-materialism of actor network theory (ANT) or of object-orientated ontology (OOO), whose theorists might not fully concur with this positioning of the human as a kind of reference point or framing device from which to explore the ‘vibrancy’ of existence.
New materialism: the ‘assemblage’ approach to age and ageing
Andrews and Duff, in their review of the post-humanist turn in gerontology, link it with ‘new materialism’, ‘assemblage theory’ and ANT as outlined by writers such as Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Manuel Delanda, Gilles Deleuze, Donna Harraway, Bruno Latour and Nigel Thrift (Andrews and Duff Reference Andrews and Duff2019: 48). In this section we focus on the first three – Deleuze, Delanda and Latour – as exponents of the new materialism and articulators of one of its central tenets, the concept of ‘assemblages’. Of the three, Gilles Deleuze has been identified most with the concept of assemblages, the English translation of his term ‘agencement’ (Buchanan Reference Buchanan2017: 457). Buchanan argues that Latour ‘takes the concept from Deleuze and Guattari and adapts it to his own purposes’, of which the linkage between ‘actants’ and ‘assemblages’ is perhaps the most notable example. Delanda offers his own interpretation – ‘Entities ranging from atoms and molecules to biological organisms, species and ecosystems may be usefully treated as assemblages’ – at the same time observing, however, that ‘the work of Deleuze … hardly amounts to a fully-fledged theory’ (Delanda Reference Delanda2019: 3).
Delanda suggests thinking of assemblage theory, within the context of society, as a development from, or of, Deleuze’s thinking, rather than simply being a mere elaboration of it. He argues that ‘assemblages are made up of parts which are self-subsistent and articulated by relations of exteriority so that a part may be detached and made a component of another assemblage’ (Delanda Reference Delanda2019: 19). Such writing conjures up a ‘Lego’-like model of the social world, exhibiting its order or patterning according to the materiality of its parts rather than reflecting something of their intrinsic qualities. Accordingly, Delanda argues that every assemblage is ‘unique, singular, historically contingent and individual’, achieved (realized) through ‘the collective unintended consequence of intentional action’, rather than the outcome of 'an internally determined logos' (Delanda Reference Delanda2019: 40).
While Delanda is concerned with assemblages of the social, Latour is more concerned with deconstructing the social into assemblages, assemblages of multiple types of entity, human, non-human, organic, non-organic, each entity a potentially independent contribution to the assemblage itself: each serving as an actant whose connectivity alone constitutes the social. In his early work in science studies, Latour had sought to show researchers in the social sciences that sociology is not the science of human beings alone – that it can welcome crowds of non-humans with open arms. Collective experience may be woven out of speaking subjects, but they are subjects to which objects are attached at all points. By opening explanation to include objects, he argues, ‘the social bond would become less mysterious’ (Latour Reference Latour and Porter1996: viii). This freeing up of social science to focus on such assemblages enabled Latour to argue that the social is to be found in the quality of the linkages between objects, not in the objects themselves. Hence the social should not be confined to what is understood as human or combinations of humans – persons, organizations, nations and so on – but should incorporate the whole world of objects.
Some of those working within ‘post-human’ ageing studies have taken up such a Latourian approach, whether by directly applying science and technology studies (STS) thinking to research on the interaction between older people and technology, or by adopting a wider-ranging ‘new materialist’ epistemology through the framework of a new ‘materialist gerontology’ (Cozza et al. Reference Cozza, Gallistl, Wanka, Manchester and Moreira2020; Cozza and Wanka Reference Cozza and Wanka2024; Peine and Neven Reference Peine and Neven2021). These attempts to apply these theorizations of assemblages to the study of ageing are said to be ‘at the crossroad of STS, material gerontology, design and medical sociology’ (Cozza et al. Reference Cozza, Gallistl, Wanka, Manchester and Moreira2020: 117). Their overarching approach, it is said, is based on the ‘co-constitution’ of ageing, treating ageing as ‘a processual constellation of practices that is distributed between humans and non-humans’ (Cozza et al. Reference Cozza, Gallistl, Wanka, Manchester and Moreira2020: 123). This ‘materialist gerontology’ conjures up a figurative radicalism (in the sense of its loose allusion to ‘historical materialism’), a hard-nosed rejection of subjectivity and a more or less explicit political alliance with environmentalism.
A critique of post-humanist reason in social gerontology and ageing studies
We have allocated considerable portions of this article to outlining the general positions of the post-humanist turn in order to demonstrate that the critique that we are making should not be dismissed as simply being based on ‘misconceptions about posthumanism in aging research’ (Cozza and Wanka Reference Cozza and Wanka2024: 4). We believe that we have represented these positions correctly and that our critique is based on what we think flows from such post-humanist positions in the field of social gerontology and ageing studies. Specifically, if we go beyond what may be considered a form of ‘performative signalling’ regarding the post-humanist/new materialist commitments, it is difficult to identify what specific methodological or indeed material benefits may arise for understanding later life from the post-humanist/‘new materialist’ turn. Indeed, as the Foucauldian scholar Thomas Lemke has pointed out, the aim of sensitizing us ‘to the problems of anthropocentrism and human hubris’ associated with these approaches ‘stands in stark contrast to the self-promoting rhetoric that [these] protagonists … employ and their overblown theoretical claims’ (Lemke Reference Lemke2017: 146). Such critiques, he argues, ‘obscure the de facto privileged role and the planetary power of humans to affect other objects’ (Lemke Reference Lemke2017: 147). Others have made different criticisms – over their inconsistency in decrying dualisms and dichotomies (human/non-human, nature/society) whilst promoting new ones such as ‘hierarchical versus non-hierarchical’ (Schleusener Reference Schleusener2021) as well as effecting an implicit denial of the ‘strikingly asymmetric distribution of power’ within a world of ‘actants’, ‘agents’ and ‘assemblages’ (Schleusener Reference Schleusener2021: 528).
In response, it is useful to quote Latour, who, fully aware of this problem, argued that ‘power, like society, is the final result of a process and not a reservoir, a stock or a capital, that will automatically provide an explanation. Power and domination have to be produced, made up, composed. Asymmetries exist … but where do they come from and what are they made out of?’ (Latour Reference Latour2005: 64). While we believe that Latour is correct in his formulation, what he underplays is that social science has already gone quite a way in exploring the sources and the accumulation of power (as in Bourdieu’s work on the reproduction of privilege [Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1990] or Sayer’s critique of Foucauldian notions of power [Sayer Reference Sayer2012]). Any search for a material (object-like, non-human, non-social) determination of the asymmetries of power and privilege that can easily enough be observed in the world ignores the fact that objects themselves are not arranged as representing or exercising power simply through how they are fixed up together, without their being invested in common social (i.e. human) meanings. The trading of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as a new virtual asset class, for example, is simply unimaginable if reference is confined to the technological machinery that generates them. Such systems of exchange are uniquely human and lack sense if they are removed from human imagination coupled with some knowledge of history and systems of social (human) exchange (Raman and Raj Reference Raman, Raj, Mnaouer and Chaari2021; Sestino et al. Reference Sestino, Guido and Peluso2022).
Of course, post-humanism and the new gerontological materialism are not meaningless developments: if this were so, they would not warrant consideration by us or any other researchers working in the field. But just as NFTs have no meaning beyond that realized through the human activities of the market, so the activities of the proponents of the new post-human, materialist gerontology need to be understood not as matters of ‘objectcy’ – the production of books and papers and presentations – but as matters of interests, intentions and directions. As a recent example of thinking in the mode of this new gerontology, James Fletcher states that ‘new materialism offers theoretical grounds for attending to the world itself as the site of dementia and hence the target of anti-dementia intervention’ (Fletcher Reference Fletcher2023: 7). In place of the current paradigm, focusing on neuropathological changes in the ‘ageing brain’, he suggests employing a materialist gerontology to focus instead on ‘the amalgamated effects of socio-political determinants spread across the past several decades (e.g. anti-pollution laws, education access), gradually shaping a population’s dementia risk profile and the manner in which cognitive decline is experienced’ (Fletcher Reference Fletcher2023:7). While it might seem radical to imagine that ‘new materialism could reinvigorate social science as a means of understanding and intervening in cognitive disorder’, exactly how ‘rejecting intellectual distinctions between immaterial social and material physical worlds’ (Fletcher Reference Fletcher2023: 5) might achieve such re-invigoration is unclear. It is unclear, for example, to us (and, we suspect, to many others) how such understandings that ‘position dementia as something that materialises in embodied relational engagements and active sensory contexts’ offer anything new or promising beyond the truism that dementia affects people who are inevitably, qua people, ‘embodied in relational engagements’. The ‘flat ontology’ implicit in much of the new materialist thinking that Fletcher seems to follow seems to imply that everything and anything matters and embodies meaning – whether the focus is on dementia or indeed any sort of ‘becoming’. Establishing research priorities from such ‘everything matters’ strategies makes such goals almost impossible to formulate.
Similarly, using a ‘material lens’ to foreground the relational dimensions of care for older people is thought by some to help ‘de-centre the continuities of self, [and the] biographical coherence and autonomous agency that define the status of the human subject in conventional humanism’ (Katz and Leibing Reference Katz, Leibing, Ward and Sandberg2023: 63). Katz and Liebing challenge the current emphasis on person-centred care, quoting approvingly DeFalco’s orientation towards the ‘constant flux of tools and technologies, behaviours, embodiments, economies and ecologies’ (DeFalco 2020: 51, quoted in Katz and Leibing Reference Katz, Leibing, Ward and Sandberg2023: 63). In another paper, published as part of a special issue of the Journal of Aging Studies on ‘The Growing Older of Humans, Non-humans, and More-Than-Humans’, the same authors use post-humanism to argue in favour of what they call ‘alienation-centred dementia care’, which they posit would provide an alternative to approaches built on the idea of the preservation of personhood with its idea of interior authenticity and instead embed the person living with dementia in the multiple networks of material, human and non-human relations (Leibing and Katz Reference Leibing and Katz2024). Such a shift may reflect an interest in applying an adapted form of critical theory to ‘revitalizing’ the conceptualization of care, but it could be equally argued that this seems a long-way-round attempt to seek more resources for care by focusing on the manifold nature of environments and entanglements. In his chapter in Critical Dementia Studies (Ward and Sandberg Reference Ward and Sandberg2023), Nick Jenkins takes this decentring further by calling for ‘critical multi-species dementia studies’ that involve
disrupting and destabilising the ideology of human exceptionalism that has, for the last two centuries, pervaded this field of enquiry. Since the late-18th century, human exceptionalism has been at the centre of our attempts to define dementia and to understand that which dementia affects. Humans, according to exceptionalist logic, are distinct from all other sentient forms of life. Their unique attributes and endowments (principally the capacity for reason, self-awareness and episodic memory) serve to make humans worthy of superior moral consideration. (Jenkins Reference Jenkins, Ward and Sandberg2023: 73)
This celebration of humanity, Jenkins argues, needs to be junked. Replacing such humanist ideology requires an awareness that relations between the human and the non-human are central to the accomplishment of human selves. This, he argues, involves a multi-species approach. Jenkins is very well aware that this position will have a fair degree of pushback from researchers, professionals and advocates working in this field. He accepts that many people will be horrified at the ‘animalising’ of people living with dementia and that taking such a position has the potential to create ‘highly divisive fault-lines’. However, he also believes that not to move beyond human exceptionalism risks ‘re-enforcing the centuries-old, well-intentioned belief that reliance on the liberal humanist project will somehow lead to a more “enlightened” approach to dementia across the world’ (Jenkins Reference Jenkins, Ward and Sandberg2023: 80).
When presented in such terms, an older ‘materialism’, born of the Enlightenment, seems rather more attractive. We would argue that ageing, without reference to social history, social meaning and social structures (such as the nation-state, the economy, the family, etc.), risks being reduced to the generic ‘flat’ processes of birth, reproduction and senescence, distributed equally and non-hierarchically across assemblages of species, genera and kinds. But who then would be concerned about its ‘fairness’, its ‘finality’, if not us, we humans? Who (or what) else cares for our all too human old age? As Gerth and Mills wrote, nearly a century ago: ‘Man [sic] is a unique animal species in that he is also an historical development. It is in terms of this development that he must be defined … Neither his anatomy nor his psyche fix[es] his destiny’ Gerth and Mills (Reference Gerth and Mills1954: 480).
Conclusions
Our aim in writing this contribution to the ‘Forum’ section of Ageing and Society has been to challenge both the assumptions and the utility of post-humanist and new materialist approaches in the understanding of later life and human ageing. A key criticism directed at sociologists such as ourselves is that human agency is prioritized in accounts of the social over other more material considerations. As a key text in this field has pointed out: ‘Our existence depends from one moment to the next on myriad micro-organisms and diverse higher species, on our own hazily understood bodily and cellular reactions and on pitiless cosmic motions, on the material artifacts and natural stuff that populate our environment’ (Coole and Frost Reference Coole, Frost, Coole and Frost2010: 1). Fox and Alldred (Reference Fox and Alldred2018) see such a standpoint as necessitating an approach which includes, inter alia, human bodies, other animated organisms, material things, spaces, places and the natural and built environment, along with material forces such as gravity and the weak and strong nuclear forces. They point out that the ‘new’ materialism and its turn to ‘matter’ does not privilege any particular set of relations or inscribe them within a hierarchy of power. Rather than being the merely passive or inert context in which social agency and social relations are enacted, the world is seen as possessing a sense of omnipresent vitality. Hence, ageing and its various forms of socially mediated materiality (including frailty and dementia) are equally sites that could benefit from this post-human and new materialist perspective.
Investing all material being with equal forms of agency has produced a reaction from writers such as the cultural theorist Terry Eagleton (Reference Eagleton2017). Eagleton criticizes the new materialism not only for its transcendent vitalism but also because it represents something that is defined by an implicit opposition to what it sees as human agency and the role of humans in creating the social world and investing social meaning in what otherwise remains stubbornly neither social nor socially agentic. Even more negatively, it can intensify the experience of social alienation and de-humanization (Ahn Reference Ahn2023), rather than being in any real sense emancipatory. As we have made clear throughout this article, we take a similar view about the merits of these responses and their antagonism to the centrality of humans in social processes.
This is not to assert that there are no interesting things being written about ageing and later life from within this perspective, for example as regards the role of technology in creating alternative ageing imaginaries (Wanka and Gallistl Reference Wanka and Gallistl2018). But all too often what they tend to demonstrate is not dissimilar to what has been described as the ‘social construction of ageing’ (Gilleard Reference Gilleard2025) where all is reduced to the interplay between the ageing body, the ageing person and an ageing society. Matter matters socially, as does its transformation. This is seen in the role that senescence plays in the personal and social aspects of ageing. Senescence, a term which pertains to the condition or process of deterioration and death that comes with age, rarely appears in the social science literature, as if approaches that conceive of ageing as underpinned by corporeal processes of decline risk ‘misrecognising’ later life or somehow performing an act of ‘epistemic violence’ on our understanding (Gilleard and Higgs Reference Gilleard and Higgs2023).
Rather than investigating the various connections that could be made between what may be described as the ‘corporeality’ of ageing and its social manifestations (Gilleard and Higgs Reference Gilleard and Higgs2014), the new materialism approach argues forcefully for a greater investment in patterns of ageing extending beyond the corporeal and the social, to incorporate ‘a perspective [that] shows how age is much more than human [but] goes beyond an aging body, a human life course or generational time [and] also includes temporalities of digital technologies, socio-technical innovation processes or temporalities of algorithmic and automated decision making’ (Gallistl and Wanka Reference Gallistl and Wanka2023: 6). This notion that everything is mixed up with everything else renders the analysis of any social phenomenon an almost impossible undertaking, forever at risk of being framed as ‘the materiality of epistemic violence’ (Gallistl and Wanka Reference Gallistl and Wanka2023: 6).
If the new materialism’s main thrust were designed to restrain the development of a ‘nothing but society’ sociology of ageing, recognizing that the social structuring of later life cannot but be presaged in part on the materiality of age – how it affects appearance, organ function and other corporealities – we would wholeheartedly support such positioning. But it seems that the question of ‘mattering’ raised by the new materialism is more concerned with the imaginative expansion of meaning intention and agency beyond that which is human, indeed beyond that which is living and organic, to non-living matter. This is taken to extremes, for example, in Lupton’s endorsement of Haraway’s idea of ‘natureculture’ and its extension to ‘compost-ism’ where the entanglements of ‘human bodies, other organic matter, and non-organic matter as a process of ageing that nourishes the earth’ lead to a view that positions human bodies ‘as part of the rich organic assemblage that is slowly decaying and merging into a more-than-human entity in which the original components cannot be distinguished one from the other’ (Lupton Reference Lupton2024: 3). This ‘all world ageing’ perspective and its impact on human positionality reduces later life to a flat ontology from which it seems almost any assemblage can be constructed with little sense of priority.Footnote 2 We, correspondingly, do not agree that the post-humanist/new materialist paradigm ‘not only provides impulses for new research on age and aging but also enriches in general the social sciences’ (Höppner and Urban Reference Höppner and Urban2019: 2). Rather, we believe that this turns much research into what Rojek and Turner (Reference Rojek and Turner2000) have described as ‘decorative sociology’ whose convoluted explanations of issues around age and ageing are better understood in terms of human institutions and relationships.
To conclude, we should remind ourselves of how humanism is generally understood rather than rely on its post-humanist caricature. Clarifying the difference between humanism and post-humanism, the sociologist Doug Porpora writes:
Humanism describes what is humanly shared rather than different. That is the first thing: universalism. Second, in speaking of the dignity and worth of human beings, humanism, without denying the worth of the non-human, is affirming something special about humans. It is upholding what critics will call human exceptionalism. Third, the exceptional value that humanism accords humanity resides in human mental functioning. Fourth, that distinctive mental functioning is specifically rationality and moral agency. And, finally, fifth, if human worth and dignity depend on mental qualities that humans share, then in principle those qualities might also be shared by beings that are non-human. (Porpora Reference Porpora2017: 357–358)
We would argue that championing the dignity, worth and moral agency of humans needs to be at the heart of ageing studies and central to those policies and practices supporting the care of frail older people. Rather than being framed as an impediment to knowledge and understanding, the essentially human nature of ageing should remain central in both theory practice and policy (Derkx and Laceulle Reference Derkx, Laceulle and Pinn2019). We remain seriously unconvinced about the orientation and guiding ideas offered by this new paradigm and would echo Lorraine Daston in her book Against Nature, reiterating that ‘it is pointless to yearn for that which is in principle unattainable … [since] human reason in human bodies is the only kind of reason we have’ (Daston Reference Daston2019: 69).
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