1. Having faithful reality claims

Donna Haraway (Reference Haraway1988), in her seminal article on situated knowledge, warned feminists of the problems of the social constructivist paradigm and urged them to construct reliable “reality” claims. She reminded them that feminist inquiry had to confront the question of “objectivity” and pointed out that feminists were often trapped, at the hands of the masculine instruments of the social constructivist paradigm, on one side of a tempting polarization on the question of objectivity (576). According to this polarization, and following the social constructivist critique, to the extent that all epistemic acts are conceived as reflections of certain acts of power rather than as claims to reality, the task of feminism would be limited to exposing and deconstructing the biases inherent in all epistemic practices; with the result that feminisms would give up the claim to have a say on the real. It is noteworthy that Haraway, back in the 1980s, framed the critique of the social constructivist paradigm, often used in the field we now call new materialism, around the legitimacy of reality claims.

While the social constructivist paradigm pointed to the rhetorical nature of reality, including scientific truth, through the tools of linguistics, semiotics, and deconstruction, Haraway observed that its position on reality and objectivity was rather reduced to the point where “history is a story that Western culture buffs tell each other; science is a contestable text and power field; the content is form. Period” (Reference Haraway1988, 577). The dominant imaginary in this paradigm was militaristic in nature:

She went on to lament that whenever feminists tried to show that scientific and technological constructions were historically specific and not universal, they run into the brick wall of this masculine and military paradigm.

Feminists, in turn, had to avoid falling prey to this paradigm and “insist on a better account of the world; it is not enough to show radical historical contingency and modes of construction for everything” (579). The problem was “how to have simultaneously an account of radical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies’ for making meaning, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world” (579).

Donna Haraway would go on to develop this commitment, which she called “situated knowledge,” in opposition to a transcendental, omnipresent, masculine, God-like epistemic vision. Here she did not enter the discussion of whether we can access or think of a reality beyond our own means of constructing and interpreting it. Rather, she was content to call for better, and therefore more responsible, accounts of reality that were partial and open to a multiplicity of diffractively constructed others. It seems that her concern was not with the possibility of access to a reality beyond semiotic or cultural mediation, but with the battlefield of having a say over the one, omnipresent, ubiquitous claim to reality, be it “semiology or narratology” (579). Indeed, she noted that “the issue is ethics and politics perhaps more than epistemology” (579). This, she argued, was the key to having faithful knowledge claims ‘on the reel’ without falling into either positivist naïve realism or the social constructivist battleground that turns everything into social constructs of military moves. A few years later, however, she would make her position on this point clearer, asserting that “nature cannot pre-exist its construction” (Reference Haraway, Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler1992, 296). This statement marks a decisive alignment with an explicitly correlationist position.

2. Correlationism: a “nature that cannot pre-exist its construction”

Correlationism, “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from each other” (Meillassoux Reference Meillassoux and Brassier2008, 13), is said to set the stage for post-Kantian philosophy. It can take either a weak position, as in Kantian correlationism, in which the reality and thinkability of being in itself—noumena—is acknowledged; or a strong position, in which being-in-itself is considered unthinkable (35). Either way, it postulates a philosophy of non-accessibility to being in itself, which would pre-exist or exist independently of the mediation of thought, culture, semiotics, etc. Strong correlationism, according to Meillassoux (Reference Meillassoux and Brassier2008, 37), takes two forms: (a) the inseparability of thought from its content, and (b) the absolutization of correlation itself, the latter being attributed to a wide range of post-Kantian philosophies, including such opposite poles as Deleuzian or Bergsonian vitalism and Hegelian dialectics, whose concepts of Life, Perception, and Mind, respectively, refer to absolutized correlations.

Haraway’s position would then adhere to a rather strong form of correlationism, which excludes the existence of a nature prior to its construction by, and not simply its givenness to, something or someone. One might then ask what kind of reality claims feminists are called to make. As noted above, in Haraway’s case, they wouldn’t be about being in itself. Situated knowledge is more a call to dismantle absolute claims to reality and be accountable for their world-making capacity than a quest for access to being independent of thought. Nevertheless, the new materialist feminists would respond to it differently, in the form of developing knowledge claims about matter itself, or in Grosz’s terms, “the dynamic force of the real,” how it allows for representation and how much of the real is captured by it (Grosz in Kontturi and Tiainen Reference Kontturi and Tiainen2007, 247), unmediated by thought. Whether they escape correlationism, however, would be another question to which I will return later, after reframing their critique of Butlerian performativity as a critique of correlationism.

3. New materialist feminisms: return to active matter

What the various new materialist feminist positions have in common is a critique of the “linguistic turn” (Rorty Reference Rorty1992) or the “cultural turn” in which language, culture, and discourse take precedence (Coole and Frost Reference Coole and Frost2010). Coole and Frost (Reference Coole and Frost2010, 3) link the need to recenter materialism to a growing dissatisfaction with the conceptual approaches circulating around textuality in so-called social constructivist circles. Other new materialists also believe that social constructivism has proved incapable of adequately conceptualizing matter and materiality. We hear Barad, for instance, lament that

Intra-action (Barad Reference Barad2007), where both matter and meaning emerge, would be their way of making matter actually matter. Elizabeth Grosz (Reference Grosz2005) also accuses social constructivism of construing “nature, biology and the inhuman forces as raw materials at the very ‘beginning’ of constructive processes which drop out of relevance as they are synthesized, symbolized, and transformed into cultural products” (4). Drawing on Bergson, she seeks to conceive of culture in evolutionary continuity with “the real, the outside, materiality, forces, events” that precede signification and representational thought (5). She would regard culture as the culture of nature, nature’s deployment, and an aspect of its activity (Kontturi and Tiainen, Reference Kontturi and Tiainen2007, 248).

This new materialist return to matter has appeared in diverse, but sometimes converging fields of research, such as feminist science and technology studies, speculative realism, object-oriented feminism (OOF), and posthumanism. The distinctions and similarities between these schools of thought are beyond the scope of this article, which is limited to new materialist feminisms that engage with science studies, thus excluding discussions of Object Oriented Ontology (OOO),Footnote ² and posthumanism beyond that of Rosi Braidotti (Reference Braidotti2013). These new materialist feminisms (which I will call vitalist new materialisms) are largely influenced by Deleuze-Guattarian assemblage thought—with the exception of Karen Barad—hence the Deleuze-Guattarian reading of Spinoza, according to which substance as natura naturans constitutes a multiplicity expressed by its irreducible attributes, including but not limited to thought and extension.

On closer inspection, we see that this critique is mostly formulated as a critique of correlationism in terms of the problem of access. “What compels the belief that we have a direct access to cultural representations and their content that we lack toward the things represented?” Barad asks (Reference Barad, Bath, Bauer, von Wilfingen, Saupe and Weber2005, 187). Vicky Kirby (Reference Kirby2017) poses a similar question to Judith Butler, who is said to preclude any access to the reality of sex beyond linguistic means or cultural inscription. Butler’s position stands out as a strong correlationism in that “a pre-cultural, or extra-linguistic appeal to what we might term the reality of sex is not just impossible to grasp because access is denied; more profoundly, it is rendered unthinkable because it is only with/in language and discourse that the world appears sensible” (Kirby Reference Kirby2017, 5, emphasis added). In other words, Judith Butler, one of the most significant representatives of the cultural turn in gender studies, is said to reduce the body and matter to a sign. When Kirby argues for extending the range of language and discourse to biological codes and their intelligence, saying that “‘life itself’ is creative encryption” (Reference Kirby2017, 5, 73)—a position (also shared by Elizabeth Grosz above) that I will later critically analyze under the rubric of what Meillassoux calls the subjectalist strain of strong correlationism, Butler further explains their strain of correlationism:

Butler’s answer here is a perfect example of a “correlationist circle,” which posits that there can be “no X without givenness of X, and no theory of X without a positing of X,” and “X cannot be separated from this special act of positing, of conception” (Meillassoux Reference Meillassoux2012, 409). In this picture, any scientific statement about “life itself” would be a “metaphor” or a model that, in a rather circular way, refers to the relation or co-(r)relation between the two terms.

The new materialist feminists (Kirby Reference Kirby1997; Braidotti Reference Braidotti2002; Grosz Reference Grosz2005; Barad Reference Barad2007; Bell Reference Bell2007) share this critique of Butler—though Barad has a more nuanced approach, diffractively embracing performativity.Footnote ³ They criticize them of conceiving pre-linguistic materiality merely as an effect of power, direct access to which is forever foreclosed. By contrast, in their quest to conceive of the agency of matter in-itself—beyond its cultural, symbolic, or linguistic mediation—they unambiguously rely on the Deleuze-Guattarian precedence of relationality, be it intra-agency (Barad Reference Barad2007), or transcorporeality (Alaimo Reference Alaimo2010), to its terms. Natureculture, Haraway’s (Reference Haraway2003) word for assemblage, is thus conceived in a manner similar to Deleuze-Guattarian Spinozist substance as multiplicity expressed through thought and extended being—matter—attributes that are distinct but entangled. In what follows, I will further explore new materialists’ critique of Butler as a critique of Butlerian strain of correlationism, while asserting that their relationalism does not, in fact, evade it.

4. New materialist criticism of Butlerian performativity as a critic of correlationism

One might arguably claim that the most poignant criticism of new materialist feminism against the cultural paradigm appears in the form of a criticism of Butlerian performativity. The return to active matter indeed passes through this subtle critique. In this section, I will briefly explain Butler’s conception of materiality in Bodies that matter (Reference Butler1993) and explicate the new materialist criticism of it.

Judith Butler takes issue with the sex/gender divide, arguing against conceptualizing sex in reference to material reality, and gender as a cultural construction; as this divide itself resorts to an understanding of body as a pre-linguistic pure and natural given that is “lived through the meanings and practices of gender” (Colebrook Reference Colebrook, Alaimo and Hekman2008, 67). They rather insist that sex itself (by extension body and matter), erroneously conceived as a pre-linguistic given material reality, has always already gone through a cultural inscription. Hence, in rather correlationist terms, “matter is not a foundation that precedes relations but always already given through relations” (67). The materiality of sex cannot thus be accessed without the mediation of symbolic means that guarantee cultural intelligibility. Yet, throughout the book, it remains ambiguous whether the argument that sex, much like gender, is linguistically constructed is intended as an ontological claim or an epistemological one. In one illustrative passage, for instance, Butler contends that what is deemed pre-linguistic body is, in fact, the surface effect of a signification process determined by normative power:

Butler here makes it clear that the very act of signification is generative of the sign which is subsequently presumed to correspond to an external reality. This is yet another, and maybe more accurate, depiction of the correlationist circle they dwell in: every theory of X is inevitably a theory of its positing and X is inseparable from this act of positing (Meillassoux Reference Meillassoux2012, 409). But is it an ontological or epistemological statement (Vasterling Reference Vasterling1999, 22), or is Butler a strong or weak correlationist?

Following Vasterling (Reference Vasterling1999), if Butler’s position is deemed ontological, it would amount to a form of linguistic monism, wherein the body is ontologically constructed by language. If, however, it is understood as epistemological, it would be akin to a Kantian position, hence weak correlationism, wherein access to the body (or the materiality of sex, or the biology of the body etc.) is merely epistemological as a phenomenon, and not a noumenon. This ambiguity pervades Bodies that matter, and there is little reason to assume that Butler endorses the first position (Vasterling Reference Vasterling1999). Indeed, they explicitly state: “This is not to say that the materiality of bodies is simply and only a linguistic effect which is reducible to a set of signifiers” (Butler Reference Butler1993, 30). Rather, as evidenced in their previously cited response to Kirby, Butler appears to suggest that any invocation of language in reference to outside reality is simultaneously generative, leaving behind a trace that obscures any claim to an ideal representational correspondence. Our knowledge of reality is mediated by language. To that, the new materialisms, which uphold the entanglement of matter and meaning, would object only insofar as this position remains confined within the boundaries of the old correspondence problem, which presupposes a subject-object divide. Instead, they seek to circumvent this issue altogether by positing, or in Meillasoux’s terms, absolutizing, a mode of relationality in which mattering and signification co-emerge, such as natureculture (Haraway Reference Haraway2003), intra-action (Barad Reference Barad2007), or assemblage (Braidotti Reference Braidotti1994, Reference Braidotti2018).

Yet, Butler goes further than that when they ask, “Can language simply refer to materiality, or is language also the very condition under which materiality may be said to appear” (Butler Reference Butler1993, 31, emphasis added). Butler seems to incline toward the latter, construing materiality, through Foucault, a power effect. However, Butler simultaneously suggests the existence of a reality that is not itself mediated by language, while maintaining that the condition of its appearance, or givenness is linguistic mediation. In a rather Kantian stance, they acknowledge the existence of things-in-themselves, but maintain that our access is necessarily confined to phenomena which are mediated through language. For Butler, access thus signifies cultural intelligibility (Vasterling Reference Vasterling1999, 22).

Materiality, in this framework, is a power effect, its cultural intelligibility (hetero)normatively structured. Consequently, while a pre-linguistic materiality may exist, there is no access to it outside the discursive mediation. When Butler, in response to Kirby’s inquiry regarding the ontology of biology, simply asserts that we cannot know it, they appear to suggest that there is no extra-linguistic epistemological access to materiality. This restriction of accessibility to intelligibility forecloses the activity of the virtual—an aspect that new materialist feminists, drawing on Irigaray and Deleuze, foreground as crucial to processes of becoming (Vasterling Reference Vasterling1999). New materialist feminists insist on means of access to materiality that are not exclusively mediated through language. They emphasize the activity of matter-meaning assemblages, whose operations cannot be fully reduced to language, particularly through the Spinozist theory of affect.

Nonetheless, on another occasion that Kolozova (Reference Kolozova2014) identifies as the “a priori refusal to pose the question of the real” (2014, 51) in correlationism, which goes so far as to “affirm the ‘unreal’ or the mentally produced reality as the only possible reality” (52), Butler adopts a stronger strain of correlationism by reducing the materiality of sex to fiction or fantasy as opposed to a higher reality.

Here, the materiality of sex is framed as a constitutive fiction that acts as real, in relation to a higher reality, one evocative of Hegelian Wirklichkeit.Footnote ⁴ The weak correlationist prohibition on epistemological access to matter in-itself gives way to a strong correlationism, wherein the ontological status of materiality is reduced to a fictive or phantasmatic field, serving as an unreal or imaginary ground—or rather, an unground—for cultural intelligibility. Butler appears to assert that “the very status of necessity (ananke, Zwang) that the fiction of ‘sex’ (and its ‘materiality’) holds constitutes an aspect, a component, a situation, or a part of the topology of the only possible reality we can encounter, be in, live, or think—that of language” (57). In this view, sex attains both its status and sense of the real retrospectively, through language and within the symbolic order.

Notwithstanding the reference to the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy, Butler’s position appears to conflict with the psychoanalytic understanding of sex as articulated by Copjec (Reference Copjec2004) and Zupančič (Reference Zupančič2017). According to them, sex is fundamentally “disjoined from the signifier,” and “opposes itself to sense,” or signification (Copjec Reference Copjec1994, 21). Copjec specifically critiques Butler for extrapolating from “the structural incompleteness of language” to “the incompleteness” (21) or instability of sex, asserting that Butler’s inference— “from the changing concepts of women” (19) to conclusions about the ontology of sex in Gender trouble—is a problematic move. Indeed, it is a similar extrapolation that Butler themselve criticizes in Kirby above. Thus, it can aptly be concluded, following Kirby, that Butler reduces materiality to a sign, oscillating between weak and strong correlationism regarding the reality of materiality independent of its cultural inscription.

Kolozova, by contrast, adopts a Laruellean non-philosophical stance to move beyond the real–unreal divide, which she sees as a metaphysical remnant in Butler’s work. Meanwhile, other new materialist feminists predominantly embrace a vitalist position, centering on “radical immanence” or “embodied materialism” (Bell Reference Bell2007, 97)—a Deleuzian framework that seeks to account for the agency of creative (99) or “vibrant” (Bennett Reference Bennett2010) matter, conceived in-itself, beyond its cultural inscription. In what follows, I will further elaborate on this position, which has been hailed as a rupture with correlationism due to its emphasis on active matter (Sheldon Reference Sheldon and Grusin2015) and argue that it nevertheless cannot eschew a particular strain of correlationism dubbed subjectalism.

5. New materialism: a break from correlationism?

Building on Bell’s analysis (Reference Bell2007, 100–04), one might contend that in Butler’s work, difference largely belongs to the normative field that governs cultural intelligibility—imposed as a system of norms that exert violence. Within this framework, little can be said, of the differences intrinsic to the materiality of the body, apart from their status as retrospectively constructed fictions, or phantasmatic registers. While Butler doesn’t explicitly reject the existence of a pre-linguistic or extra-linguistic world, the unmediated substance-ness of this world is rendered both unthinkable and unrepresentable (Kirby Reference Kirby1997, 109). Hence, “the substance of nature is erased” (114, 125), reducing materiality to a passive substrate upon which cultural and linguistic inscriptions are inscribed.

In response, new materialist feminisms argue for conceiving materiality as an active force of self-differentiating matter.

The concept of difference in Gilles Deleuze’s (Reference Deleuze1968) Différence et repetition (Reference Deleuze and Patton1994, 13), in which the principle of difference is said to ontologically precede the principle of identity, lays the groundwork for the new materialist understanding of self-differentiating matter. The philosophical precursors of Grosz’s, and other vitalist new materialist feminists’, conception of difference in general, and sexual difference in particular, as a pre-individual active material force, lie in both Bergson’s conception of creative evolution and Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. It is Deleuze who develops the concept of a “non-conceptual difference” (Reference Deleuze and Patton1994, 13), or an “individuating difference” (36) which is behind “unmediated” self-differentiation (Bell Reference Bell2007, 105). For Deleuze, difference concerns the ontology of being, differentiation being a vital process intrinsic to life itself (106). Differentiation is thus the vital force of life, its self-differentiation in accordance with élan vital, and hence a creative act. Nevertheless, in Butler’s work, difference is nothing more than “a copy of hegemonic ideals” (106) imposed by the normative symbolic order that governs the field of possibility, to be actualized in matter. Materiality or ‘sedimentation’ amounts to this process for Butler. Such a view envisages a rather limited field of cultural intelligibility that does not provide sufficient space for becoming. This being the case, the political project is limited to opening up new possibilities in this field of cultural intelligibility through Hegelian politics of identity and recognition. The ‘realization’ in Butlerian performativity, according to Bell, thus amounts to a kind of preformism insofar as materiality is conceived as a fiction that nonetheless functions as real.

The new materialist feminists overcome this problem by returning to a Deleuzian understanding of realization or materialization as the actualization of the virtual. The virtual, in this respect, is not possible, but not-yet-actualized real; differentiation being the movement of the virtual in its self-actualization (see Bell Reference Bell2007, 107; and Grosz in Alaimo and Hekman Reference Alaimo and Hekman2008, 28). Bell underlines the fact that it is the etho-ecological assemblages that need to be accounted for in any process of materialization, hence actualization of the virtual, to break away from the kind of preformism implicit in Butlerian performativity (Bell Reference Bell2007, 114).

As a concept extensively employed by new materialist feminisms, I would like to invite the reader to engage a closer examination of the concept of assemblage, as it was originally developed by Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux (Reference Deleuze and Guattari1980) in the plateau called “Sur quelques régimes des signes” where they offer a critique of classical semiology (Reference Deleuze and Guattari1980 140). The aim of this plateau is to conceptualize a relational materiality that cannot be reduced to linguistic expressions. Deleuze and Guattari insist that language is merely one regime among many, and “not the most important one” in an assemblage (140).

The assemblage consists of both a material content or form, which belongs to the regime of bodies (physical/material systems), and a form of expression, which pertains to a semiotic regime (semiotic systems) (175). These regimes are intricately intertwined but remain irreducible to one another. Thus, assemblage refers to a material-semiotic relationality that eludes reduction to its terms; it refers to the body, abstract machine, diagram, or the “irreducible multiplicity” that forms the Spinozist substance as natura naturans (Deleuze Reference Deleuze, Taormina and Lapoujade2003, 150).

Deleuze and Guattari distinguish themselves from Foucault by situating assemblage not in the field of power, but in the domain of desire; power, they argue, is merely a sedimented aspect of assemblage, rather than its foundational principle (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari1980, 175). While Foucault, and by extension Butler, begins with power, Deleuze and Guattari prioritize assemblage. This subtle but crucial shift—from placing power at the forefront to positioning assemblage as primary—represents their way of addressing a core issue in Foucauldian politics, one that Butler’s theory of performativity inadvertently inherits: the limited capacity for becoming-otherwise.

By asserting that the material-semiotic assemblage precedes power, which belongs to the normative domain governing cultural intelligibility, Deleuze and Guattari free the body’s extra-symbolic activity from the confines of normative power. The abstract machine, or the body as assemblage, is not inscribed in the symbolic order and cannot be reduced to linguistic categories; nor is it unilaterally determined by the normative field of cultural intelligibility governed by power; this is what activates various lines of flight. That’s why Deleuze and Guattari opt for the concept of lines of flight rather than the Foucauldian dictum, where there is power, there is resistance. In their framework, power becomes that which captures desire as part of a war machine. While the term resistance implies the normative precedence of power, lines of flight emphasize the active force of the assemblage inscribed in the domain of desire which precedes power and lies outside of the site of cultural intelligibility. It is within this framework that the vitalist new materialist feminisms aspire to break away from the Butlerian correlationist circle.

Braidotti, for instance, draws upon Irigaray’s critique of the Subject and her analysis of patriarchy as a regime of One-ness that erases the female’s difference in-itself, to embrace a Deleuzian vitalist politics of becoming as nomadic subjectivation. Jane Bennett’s (Reference Bennett2010) conception of vibrant matter which underscores the agency not only of the nonhuman but also the non-living matter; Karen Barad’s concept of inter-action, etho-ecological assemblages of Bell who also draws on Ilga Progogini and Isabel Stengers’s conception of matter’s capacity to choose among different solutions, and gaining “vision” to develop emerging qualities in less-than-equilibrium systems which defy rules of entropy (Bell Reference Bell2007, 111), follow the logic of assemblage described above to make justice for the agency of matter.

Against this backdrop, it is tempting to be convinced, following Sheldon (Reference Sheldon and Grusin2015) that this new materialist return to matter indeed breaks away from correlationism. But one can only do so to the detriment of disregarding Meillassoux’s (Reference Meillassoux and Brassier2008) analysis of strong correlationism.

Meillassoux (Reference Meillassoux and Brassier2008) indeed juxtaposes weak correlationism, that of Kant who proclaims that the thing-in-itself, albeit unknowable, exists, and is thinkable; and a strong correlationism the first decision of which is to proclaim that, first, it is the correlate itself that has ontological precedence, or “anything that is totally a-subjective cannot be” (38), and the second “absolutizing the correlation itself” (37). It is this second decision, which abolishes “the notion of in-itself” (37) that, according to Meillassoux, governs philosophical systems that, at first glance, seem quite disparate, such as Hegelian dialectics and Deleuzian vitalism. Although fiercely critical of the subject or metaphysics, this strain of correlationism, which is deemed to be the dominant one in post-Kantian philosophy, shares with speculative idealism the notion that “nothing can be unless it is some form of relation-to-the-world” (37). This modal of correlationism, elsewhere dubbed subjectalism, indeed defines both Haraway’s postulation that there is no nature that precedes its construction and Butler’s conception of the materiality of sex as a phantasmatic realm that retrospectively acts as real. Although Butler at times inclines toward weak correlationism by emphasizing the epistemic non-accessibility of the in-itself, their analysis of the materiality of sex is indeed a form of strong correlationism.

Although new materialist feminists criticize Butler’s theory of performativity from an anti-correlationist standpoint—challenging both their weak and strong correlationist positions—their own theoretical framework remains entangled in a modal of strong correlationism, one that, according to Meillassoux, pervades Deleuzian vitalism, among others. Absolutizing assemblage, or Spinozist substance as irreducible multiplicity, is the means by which Deleuze-Guattari absolutize correlation. Material content and expression remain inextricably intertwined yet irreducible to one another in an assemblage. Similarly, in vitalist new materialisms, the matter-thought correlation, whether conceptualized as matter-meaning in intra-action (Barad Reference Barad2007), natureculture (Haraway Reference Haraway2003), or assemblage, assumes an absolute ontological primacy. Paradoxically, matter within these ontologies is articulated in subjectalist terms, endowed with qualities historically ascribed to humans in modernity, such as agency, memory (Grosz Reference Grosz2005; Barad Reference Barad2007; Alaimo and Hekman Reference Alaimo and Hekman2008), vision (Bell, Reference Bell2007). Indeed, Bennett explicitly advocates for a strategic anthropomorphization of matter, arguing that such a move can render its vitality perceptible, “even though it resists full translation and exceeds my comprehensive grasp” (Reference Bennett2010, 122). A recurrent gesture in new materialist feminisms is the transposition of qualities traditionally ascribed to one pole of the modernist subject-object divide onto the other. Subjectivity is thus construed as possessing the same passivity historically attributed to matter (Colebrook Reference Colebrook, Alaimo and Hekman2008; Alaimo Reference Alaimo2010); while matter, in turn, is endowed with qualities conventionally associated with human cognition—agency, memory, and even language. In this vein, Grosz (Reference Grosz2005) proclaims that “nature is culture,” while Barad argues that matter and meaning are not separate entities and mattering is a matter of both the substance and signification (Reference Barad2007, 3).

Agential realism, for instance, understands matter not as a property of things, but as the entanglement of dynamic and multiple relations; it has agency insofar as the latter is conceived as enactment (35). However, this position raises the question of how to justify Barad’s claim to have access to matter-in-itself; insofar as intra-action—a field in which matter and meaning remain inextricably intertwined—has ontological precedence. Indeed, this has led critics to distinguish two mutually exclusive “grounding gestures” in Barad (Basile Reference Basile2020). While the first gesture is to defend the ontological precedence of phenomena whose intra-action leads to the emergence of a measured object, matter and meaning, subject and object, etc.; they still insist on a return to matter-in-itself, a “formulation that their doctrine should” otherwise “forbid” (Basile Reference Basile2020, 3). This is indeed a general problem in new materialism. Despite a concerted effort to access matter-in-itself, the underlying ontology, be it assemblage theory or Barad’s interpretation of Niel Bohr’s complementarity principle, recognizes the ontological primacy of a relational field—where matter and meaning are forever intertwined—over the relata. Thus, what is accessed through non-linguistic means, i.e., desire in Deleuze-Guattarian ontology, is instead a virtual domain that precedes the matter–meaning divide, and not matter-in-itself, at the molecular level; while matter at the molar level emerges as a structured function, with meaning coming out of the isomorphy between the expressive form and expressed content. This gesture of absolutizing the correlation and being done with the in-itself-ness itself remains within the confines of correlationism. Thus, although the new materialist critique of Butlerian performativity is articulated in resolutely anti-correlationist terms, the new materialisms are nonetheless unable to escape correlationism either. This reveals that, should we endeavor to pursue the trajectory outlined by Haraway—insisting on the assertion of (scientific) reality claims while simultaneously critiquing Butlerian performativity through an anti-correlationist perspective to reclaim access to matter-in-itself—it becomes incumbent upon us to critically engage with philosophical gestures employed by new materialisms in their articulation of the in-itself-ness of matter. New materialist feminisms, for their part, may be said to exhibit a significant theoretical affinity with speculative realism, particularly in their criticism of the cultural or linguistic turn and in their critique of Butlerian performativity on anti-correlationist grounds, framing it as a problem of access to matter in itself. However, their own entanglement with correlationism, as per Meillassoux’s original formulation of the concept, paradoxically situates new materialist feminisms in closer theoretical proximity to Butler than in definitive departure from their framework.

This raises the question of the tenacity of the initial new materialist turn to speculative realism’s objection to correlationism as a form of departure in their approach to performativity. Such an objection, as elsewhere critiqued, may serve a “phantasmatic function” (Zalloua Reference Zalloua2015) to deny, following Zupančič, that “the discursive reality is itself leaking, contradictory, and entangled with the Real as its irreducible other side” (in Zalloua Reference Zalloua2015, 394). Zallou, indeed, reformulates speculative realism’s pursuit of a “world without me” (404) as engendering a novel iteration of “phantasmatic transparency—the other as transparent only in isolation, absent any distorting relations or textual mediation” (406). Consequently, it is unsurprising that the deeply relational ontology underlying new materialist paradigms ultimately undermines their anti-correlationist pursuit of matter-in-itself, as this article has endeavored to elucidate.

Furthermore, one needs to be wary of the political implications of vitalist subjectalism, when, in extending its critique of modernity, it opts for pre-modern, “animistic” (Bennett Reference Bennett2010, xviii), and, at times, medieval paradigms (Lester and Little Reference Lester and Little2015),Footnote ⁵ especially if we are to align with Braidotti’s (1994) insistence on recognizing women’s achievements in modernism, and the risk involved in “skipping the most important stage: the process of historical becoming subject of women” (55). In contrast to certain undifferentiated reproaches of modernist rationalism in new materialism, especially in Jane Bennett and Stacy Alaimo, Rosi Braidotti offers a more nuanced perspective on modernism. By periodizing the emergence of critiques of the phallocentric discourse’s rational subjectivity in relation to women’s eventual attainment of the status of rational Subjects in history, she warns against what she terms “the historical time lag of the oppressed” (55). This, she argues, risks bypassing the most significant historical phase for women, when multiple alternative genealogies of modernism unfolded, one of which involved women reclaiming the position of the rational subjects in history. Rather than short-circuiting it in favor of a nostalgia for pre-modern modes of thought, one needs to critically process the gains of this phase, to affirm “an alternative vision of the female feminist subject” (Reference Braidotti2011, 122).