The backstory of the critics of humanism and the novelty of the new materialism

It is now close to 500 years since Descartes’s emphasis on “soul” energized humanism as a political project in Western thought. Formed through the negation of animals and the animalization of non-Europeans and women, the human has operated as a category that makes systemic forms of speciesism, racism, and patriarchy possible.Footnote ¹ But perhaps the decisive moment of humanism was not the birth of the Cartesian Cogito in 1637. Rather, it was in 1822 when Hegel’s philosophy of history launched the modern practice of historical positivism.Footnote ² Hegel’s key idea was that “world history” began with the spirit’s quest to divest itself from nature. To complete this “divine plan,” the spirit moved from the “Oriental world,” which was subsumed by nature, to the Christian/secular West, where spirit was actualized.Footnote ³ According to Hegel, the completion of the spirit’s journey from the East to the West enabled the European man to become concerned with not just “immediacy” but also “reflection.”Footnote ⁴ This exclusively European ability to think inwardly, free of the Orient’s “divinized nature,” meant that the European man had entered the “mature stage” of history to become modern.Footnote ⁵ The pacification of nature (the Earth, plants, and animals) and the Orient (China, India, Persia, Egypt) was thus the double gesture that formed Hegel’s white subject of humanism.

That subject is still with us today. It provides the vocabulary to refer to the “underdeveloped,” “developing,” and “traditional” peoples of the world who have not quite arrived to the mature stage of history.Footnote ⁶ It stands over and above the intellectual workers of the Global South who orient themselves toward intellectual authority external to their own societies. It encourages social and political scientists to understand the colonial and postcolonial worlds using concepts and methods developed in the Western metropole for understanding the Western metropole. It helps reduce the object world to epiphenomena of human relations and limit politics to the exclusively human domain of the social. It encourages the ontological separation of humans from animals and the subordination of the latter. And it centers the European concept of society as a universal space of sameness.Footnote ⁷ As the literature in postcolonial and critical animal studies illuminates, this knowledge system has provided intellectual justification for the colonial enterprise, operating as the bedrock for much of the structural violence that unfolds against “Orientals,” the “black continent,” the Earth, and nonhuman species.Footnote ⁸

Yet, there is a backstory to the critics of this distinctive form of humanism and its white subject. Those familiar with postcolonial theory may immediately think of Frantz Fanon’s and Homi Bhabha’s frontal attacks on humanism.Footnote ⁹ The backlash against humanism, however, did not solely come from anti- and post-colonial writers; it also came from thinkers and activists with a strong orientation toward materiality. About twenty years after Descartes formulated the human in negation of animals, Spinoza challenged the dualist Aristotelian framework (e.g., culture/nature) that shapes Cartesian philosophy.Footnote ¹⁰ In the process, Spinoza formulated one of the earliest versions of materialist relationality.Footnote ¹¹ A century and a half later, while Hegel was transmuting the natural and social poles into an outright contradiction, Friedrich Schelling argued for a holistic vision of the cosmos that transcended the dichotomy between materialism and spiritualism. In doing so, Schelling drew from sixteenth-century philosopher Giordano Bruno.Footnote ¹²

Bruno was killed in Rome for rebelling against right-wing Aristotelian and Christian scholastic principles that emphasized the externality of form to matter. Bruno’s rebellion was not merely academic. Rather, he showed how the clergy held onto political power by designating form as an active component imposed on passive matter from outside; in this case, by God and (by extension) absolute clerical authority.Footnote ¹³ For Bruno, this translated into a fixed world in which ideas are sovereign at the expense of concrete reality.Footnote ¹⁴ Against this dogma, Bruno invoked medieval Islamic thought centered on the philosophy of Ibn-e Sina, the preeminent philosopher and physician of eleventh-century Iran. Ibn-e Sina argued that the many possibilities of form emerge from the latent tendencies of matter itself—e.g., wood carries the disposition to generate a chair (or a bed, table, etc.).Footnote ¹⁵ By stressing that matter is predisposed in certain ways—that is, it both affords and disaffords various possibilities—Ibn-e Sina and his followers, including Bruno, considered the world as unfixed. This idea is central to the canon of the new materialism today.

But Bruno and Schelling were hardly the only thinkers deeply moved by Ibn-e Sina. Ernst Bloch’s prodigious utopian philosophy is also indebted to Ibn-e Sina. Indeed, Bloch credits Ibn-e Sina’s Islamic philosophy as the intellectual foundation of the left in Western thought.Footnote ¹⁶ Ibn-e Sina’s influence also traversed, albeit less explicitly, the works of Bloch’s good friend and colleague, Theodor Adorno. Material forms and flows, Adorno wrote in 1966, “do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder.”Footnote ¹⁷ This “remainder,” Adorno continued, “resists the traditional norm of adequacy.”Footnote ¹⁸ In other words, Adorno characterized modern concepts, languages, and political factions as insufficient for addressing the alterity of the material world, from its soil to its animals and plants. Material “remainder,” as such, is always the basis of a different referential system, a different “I,” and therefore a different political criterion. Indeed, Adorno’s negative transmutation of dialectics produced a genuinely new materialism before its time by preserving the mediation of the dialectical while rejecting its so-called inherent contradiction. Read in this way, Adorno championed a materialist relational approach that envelopes just about every aspect of the new materialism today.

Sixteen years before Adorno published Negative Dialectics, Canadian political economist Harold Innis wrote Empire and Communications.Footnote ¹⁹ By moving beyond discursive content and focusing on clay, parchment, and print as different mediums in various historical epochs, Innis argued that the very materiality of communication can play an organizing structural role in the formation of social relations. This remarkable insight was reformulated by Marshall McLuhan into his famous dictum, “The medium is the message.”Footnote ²⁰ While McLuhan’s interpretation was somewhat extravagant and not entirely accurate, it nonetheless energized medium theory, which remains one of the most innovative works in the sociology of the media and is central to new materialist discussions on media and communications. No sooner did medium theory take off in the 1960s than a rebellious group of North American scholars challenged a highly entrenched idea in Western thought: the separation of nature and culture. This movement was advanced by feminist critiques of science that rejected scientific uses of “nature” as justification for social inequalities, particularly against women.Footnote ²¹ This movement also articulated an alternative approach to science and technology that countered exploitative attitudes to nature. The new materialism is in continuity with this feminist thought. Perhaps, there is no theme extensively discussed by post-humanists as the contractual divide between nature, on the one hand, and culture, society, and politics on the other.

Beyond the academy, First Nations and Indigenous peoples, along with those humans who have never been quite human enough, have been living epistemologies and ontologies that defy the hegemonic figure of the human as autonomous, rational, male, and, all too often, white. Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveros de Castro have painted ethnographic portraits of Indigenous cosmologies that engender an alternative subject situated in the flow of relations with multiple others, including nonhuman animals.Footnote ²² In light of such realities, scholars of Indigenous studies often point out that posthumanism tends to “re-discover” what Indigenous people have known all along: that animals, the climate, water, atmospheres, and nonhuman presences are sentient and possess agency, and that nature and culture, and human and animal, are not so separate after all.Footnote ²³

These are but a few intellectual and ethnographic threads from a long history of defiance against binary metaphysics and its formative anthropocentrism. While this backstory provides a context to better understand recent interest in the new materialism, it also gives us reason to be suspicious of an intellectual movement that calls itself “new.” So, what is new about the new materialism? Here is my answer: while new materialists have a legacy, it is only fairly recently that an agenda for dismantling binary systems of thought, with humanism at its core, has gained traction and started looking like an interdisciplinary and transnational collective undertaking.

Members of this collective speculate about a world in which the human subject is not centered, or even central. As Kyla Wazana Tompkins points out, the timeliness of this concern for a species quickly headed toward, and already mired in, ecological disaster and multi-species genocide cannot be over-emphasized.Footnote ²⁴ While the new materialism emerged, in its early stages, as a double-critique of the linguistic/cultural turn and the Strong Program in science studies, it soon moved toward empirical research to highlight the mutually constitutive worldmaking role of nonhumans, including over thirty trillion tons of technological objects spread across the Earth’s surface.Footnote ²⁵ More recently, new materialists have sought to construct affirmative frameworks for considering an alternative cosmology. A few examples include Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman continuum between human bodies and nonhuman matter, and between subjectivity and ecology; Fiona Probyn-Rapsey and Lynette Russell’s triadic framework centered on settler-colonizer, indigene, and animal; and Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz’s ecological class.Footnote ²⁶

However, as approaches rooted in the new materialism have been increasingly used in the human and social sciences, so too have critiques emerged in response. They argue that an emphasis on nonhumans and materiality is misleading, obfuscating, unclear, opaque, or just flat-out wrong. Some decry the focus of the new materialism as too specific, referring only to the role of material things at the expense of institutions, ideology, markets, and so on. Others suggest that the new materialism is too broad, failing to capture the variety of relations and forms of difference in which materiality can be involved. Some even suggest throwing out the new materialism altogether. Peter Osborne, a leading Marxist figure in the anglophone world and the longest-serving editor of the leftist journal Radical Philosophy, frames Latour’s politico-academic project as “the main ideological challenge to Marxism,” calling on Marxists to fight back against the incorporation of posthumanism.Footnote ²⁷ Criticism of the new materialism has also found its way into the fields of Middle East studies and Iranian studies. Asef Bayat, for instance, has challenged Timothy Mitchell and me, accusing us of believing that “everything” can be explained by nonhumans.Footnote ²⁸

In the next section, I mount a defense of the literature on the new materialism. Much of the criticism of this body of work can be categorized into three main themes: the ambiguity of nonhuman agency; materiality’s elusive relations to structure and power; and the problems of collapsing nature into the social. Here, I argue that existing criticisms are misplaced and suffer from two errors: the error of selectivity, whereby critics overlook the variety of claims in the literature, and the error of misrepresentation, whereby certain understandings of materialism are mistakenly imprinted into the literature. This does not mean, however, that criticism of the new materialism is wholly unwarranted just because the literature on materiality is incomplete. Indeed, the literature does not offer a single “theory” but rather a series of diverse claims. It is to these critiques and the diverse claims of new materialists that I turn next.

Criticisms of the new materialism: the ambiguity critique

Despite its internal heterogeneity, the literature on the new materialism has a clear idea about what it refers to: the agentive qualities of the material and non-human world. As Tompkins points out, this means the new materialism is interested in relations between things, objects, phenomena, materialities, and physical bodies, as well as between those things and consciousness, feeling, affect, and other circulatory and shared social phenomena arising from the substance of the world.Footnote ²⁹

Even these basic interests, however, have attracted an array of criticism. One is the ambiguity critique advanced by Andrea Whittle, Andrea Spicer, and Bayat, which holds that agency in the new materialism is too flat to be analytically useful. In other words, when everything becomes agential, distinguishing degrees or modes of causality becomes difficult. Whittle and Spicer, for instance, contend that “by attributing organizational outcomes to the effects of technology… [the new materialism] is unable to understand how the ‘same’ technology can be interpreted and used in different ways.”Footnote ³⁰ Bayat’s ambiguity critique goes in the opposite direction. He states: “At times we read about agentic objects and at other times contingent agency; sometimes objects alone and other times public objects.”Footnote ³¹ Bayat concludes his criticism by arguing that “We need to explore how much, when, and to what effects” objects actually matter.Footnote ³²

The problem with the ambiguity critique, especially Bayat’s criticism, is its anticipation of a new positivist science that passes universal laws on what objects do all the time. This critique also misrepresents what a flat ontology is by suggesting that it refers to the idea that all things—including an ax, a sheet of paper, and a sponge—have the same kind of affordances and degree of agency. This criticism overlooks much of the new materialist literature that embeds agency in relational thinking. From a relational vantage point, different things have different affordances because of their immanent properties. Yet, these affordances are always relational to the affordances of other human and nonhuman entities. Thus, a nonhuman can do something now and nothing later. This is why new materialists distinguish between mediators and intermediaries.Footnote ³³ A mediator does something to a particular field, such as the Anopheles mosquito which worked hand-in-hand with the British to infect about a million and kill some 200,000 Egyptians during and after the 1940s invasion of al-Alamein.Footnote ³⁴ By contrast, an intermediary does nothing to a particular field, such as mosquitos completely detached from the French invasion of Algiers in 1830. Thus, to return to Bayat’s question of how, when, and to what effect nonhumans matter, the answer is that it depends. Theories and histories of materiality are always contingency-contextual. This is because nonhumans are in biological, chemical, hydraulic, military, political, and, not least, mechanical relationships with the affordances of other players.

However, relationality is not a magic bullet that somehow resolves the question of agency, as relationality can be subdued by the metanarratives and frameworks that envelope it. A relational approach limited to the culturalist framework can both diffuse and legitimate the anthropocentrism anchoring colonial and Eurocentric binary analytical systems. I worry that this problem has already contaminated the otherwise promising academic discussion on decolonization. Take, for instance, the emphasis Walter Mignolo and Julian Go place on “postcolonial relationalism.”Footnote ³⁵ Taking inspiration from numerous scholars, including Fanon and Bhabha, Mignolo and Go argue that their relational thinking can address the Eurocentric problem of “bifurcation” by showing the mutually constitutive relationships between modernity and capitalism, on the one hand, and colonialism and empire on the other. Yet, by limiting relationality to a culturalist framework, Mignolo and Go end up promulgating a different kind of colonial bifurcation that stabilizes the human as the central, dominant, and active agent that shapes history.

As Fayaz Chagani’s superb essay on postcolonial animals points out, Fanon’s vision for new forms of relational collectivity hinged on the more-than-animality of the colonized.Footnote ³⁶ And despite his relational claim that the subject has no ontological fixity, Bhabha embedded the subject’s coordinates in the psychic world reserved for humans.Footnote ³⁷ In both cases, the relationality that was supposed to overcome colonial binaries and prepare the entry of the colonized into the collective was based on a humanism that shut the door to nonhuman others. Similarly, so long as Mgnolo’s and Go’s relational frameworks remain trapped in the anthropocentrism of discursive and culturalist schemes, they will pose a challenge to the complexity of Indigenous and posthuman ways of thinking that are so central to the canon of postcolonialism.

While Mignolo’s and Go’s dwellings in anthropocentrism seem unintentional, others defend it with purpose. Indeed, the ambiguity critique reaches its climax when critics insist on privileging the agentive qualities of humans over nonhumans. “It seems dangerous,” write Whittle and Spicer, “to attribute the same degree of agency to a door-closer and a human.”Footnote ³⁸ “Fax Machines unite,” Elaine Hartwick quips, “You have nothing to lose but your electric cards.”Footnote ³⁹ However, it is Bayat who really hones in on this critique. In discussing my book, Revolution of Things: The Islamism and Post-Islamism of Objects in Tehran, Bayat notes: “every social and political twist and turn [in Iran] is explained by reference to the determining role of things/objects.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Bayat further adds, “if materiality did play a role in these dynamics, it was ultimately the humans who assigned meaning to these objects, making them mediators in the creation of discourse and, subsequently, action.”Footnote ⁴¹ Bayat concludes by calling for an emphasis on what he deems actually important in social analysis, that is, “structural dynamism, state power, and global factors.”Footnote ⁴²

Some of these criticisms can be dispatched swiftly. One is hard-pressed to find a passage in new materialist literature that claims humans, animals, and artifacts have the same kind of agency. Rather, the point of this literature is that the absence of intentionality and rationality does not equate to the absence of agency. As for Bayat’s critique, it rests on a deeply familiar, if now increasingly untenable, nineteenth-century scientific division of labor wherein society and subjects are not only produced and located outside nature and objects but are also converted into the reassuring ground of universalism. As Mitchell reminds us, while the Nile River’s shifting hydraulics and the Anopheles mosquito’s parasite are transnational and global phenomena, respectively, and while together they propelled some of the largest transformations in twentieth-century Egypt, neither is considered transnational or universal within the social sciences.Footnote ⁴³ This is because social science and theory tend to situate universalism within the spread of human reason, technological knowledge, or collective consciousness. One of the implications of grounding social explanations in the universalizing force of human intentions and projects is that, as intellectual workers of the Global South, we feel compelled to follow Bayat’s sociological model by reading our own histories through the story of nation and its development, the growth of new national classes, the rise of the modern state and capitalism, and the global history of Western modernity.Footnote ⁴⁴

In doing so, we pursue a generic model founded within and expressed by the highly provincial history of the West.Footnote ⁴⁵ Thus, we explain events in our colonial and postcolonial worlds as the local occurrence of something more general that has happened in Europe, or as a particular variation in the general range of possibilities that exist in Europe, or as an exception to what generally occurs in Europe, which nonetheless refers us back to what generally occurs in Europe. Worse yet, in each of these cases, we have already decided who counts as an agent: the human.Footnote ⁴⁶ Indeed, while Bayat claims that I have “exaggerated” the role of nonhumans by implicating them in every social “twist and turn” in Tehran, he sees no exaggeration in the literature that frames humans as the Promethean creators of Iran and its histories. The trouble here is not simply that Bayat mistakes humans for the whole story of Iran but that he falls short of acknowledging that social explanations embedded in the universalizing force of human projects cannot explore whether the very possibility of the human, and of intentionality and abstraction, depends on nonhuman elements. This is while no human faculty, including intentionality, reason, and symbolic communication, comes prior to human interactions with the nonhuman world.

Bayat’s contention that it is ultimately humans who mediate our world and singlehandedly assign meaning to things echoes the radical culturalist position in which, in Judith Butler’s words, “language” ultimately drives “the determination of every materialism.”Footnote ⁴⁷ This sort of radicalism is not limited to certain strands of the cultural turn; the claim mirrors an equally fundamentalist position on the opposite end of the spectrum. Take, for instance, some of the followers of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), who are committed to thinking through the non-relational autonomy of the object world and seek to theorize object life as existing prior to and beyond representational systems, including language.Footnote ⁴⁸ In this way, radical culturalists and scholars of OOO are quite similar. Both camps reject the idea that the connections between discursivity and materiality are relational and, in Karen Barad’s words, mutually “intra-active.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Such fundamentalism not only ignores discussions emerging from queers of color critiques, feminist science studies, and critical animal studies but also make it difficult to ask what kind of social theory and politics become possible when we stop assuming that either the human or the thing-in-itself is the center of the universe.

Finally, the ambiguity critique highlights the problem of “presentism.” Here, the material turn is accused of focusing on the analysis of present actors while ignoring “being.”Footnote ⁵⁰ As Stale Knudsen notes, “What is real [for the new materialists] is what is present to the observer.”Footnote ⁵¹ This critique, however, is also mired in the error of selectivity, as key parts of the literature have been discarded. Scholars interested in the nexus of the new materialism and absence have been exploring actors who are not always present, or even observable.Footnote ⁵² Take, for instance, Matthew C. Watson’s innovative work on subalternist cosmopolitanism, which brings Latour, Derrida, and Stengers into conversation to shed light on externalized material worlds that lack any trace of a past. Or Take, as another example, the notion of disaffordances that I have developed to highlight the formative role of absent material things in their capacity as the constitutive outside.Footnote ⁵³ Situated in Tehran, my work shows that just as women’s hair, bright attire, luxury items, Western foods, and so forth—all discursively relating to bodily pleasures—were pushed out of the public and into the private domain in the 1980s, liberal terms such as “freedom,” “plurality,” and “rights” vanished from public use, as these words no longer had material things to refer to and circulate through, highlighting the “intra-active” linkages between things and terms.Footnote ⁵⁴ In other words, the strategic absences of distinct kinds of materiality disafforded an alternative liberal vocabulary at the level of multitudes in Tehran, and this was but one way through which domination was established under Ayatollah Khomeini’s reign. The point of this new materialist literature is that absent material realities are actively, and not so innocently, produced as non-thinkable alternatives to what exists, impeding externalized material worlds from becoming pronounceable as a need or aspiration within the context of colonialism and empire.

The power and structure critique

The second critical theme is the power and structure critique. Here, critics argue that the new materialism’s emphasis on nonhuman agency and networks inadvertently sidelines analysis of enduring social structures and operations of power. Political theorist Lois Mcnay claims that the material turn “has led to a neglect of the social structures that shape political agency, resulting in a disconnect from the lived realities of inequality and power.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Human ecologist Andreas Malm goes further, arguing that new materialists—including Latour—are “averse to the category of structure.” Malm continues his criticism: “There is nothing [in Latour’s work] but motley actants bumping into each other, agglomerating for a moment and splitting off, never permitting any central source of power to form a vertical structure around itself.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Marxist scholars Damian White, Alan Rudy, and Brian Gareau argue that the new materialism and, especially, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) “tend…to be silent about the ways that power is reproduced and hidden by the reproduction of normalized stable networks.”Footnote ⁵⁷And Bayat notes that the world is more “complex” than what objects have led Mitchell and me to believe. Bayat goes on to say: “structural dynamism,” including “resource mobilization,” “framing,” and “organization” remain indispensable for analyzing sociopolitical transformation.Footnote ⁵⁸

These critics, however, may be surprised to learn that if Latour and his colleagues developed a critique of power and social structure during the 1990s, it was precisely to address the naturalization of structural inequalities in the human and social sciences. Indeed, the story of Latour’s “aversion” to social structure has often been misrepresented and reduced to his spat with the Bourdieusian “sociology of the social.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Yet, to better understand the broader forces that Bourdieu represented for Latour, it is worth considering a less familiar story, the consequences of which are built into the logic of the social sciences. Raewyn Connell sums up this story in the following way: born of colonialism, nineteenth-century social science displaced imperial power over the colonized into an abstract space of global difference.Footnote ⁶⁰ In doing so, the “founding fathers” of sociology and anthropology focused their efforts on measuring the variations of these global differences on a “progressive” temporal scale, from primitivity to civilization. Thus, while we can all acknowledge that Persians were quite different from the British during the nineteenth century, there is nothing inherent in this difference that suggests the former had to be placed within the category of “traditional societies” and thrown to another time that belongs to the past. Rather, equating difference with temporal distance was something that imperial and colonial powers actively produced and legitimated. So, when critics ask about the role of power in social analysis, they are raising a profoundly important question.

From Latour’s point of view, however, not only had contemporary social science and, especially, the Bourdieusian sociology of the social, preserved the abstract space of global difference that the founding fathers put in place, but it had also delegated the critical task of explaining the construction of such differences to concepts such as “power,” “social force,” “regulatory law,” and “ideology.”Footnote ⁶¹ These concepts are themselves heavily entrenched in a colonial binary matrix that reduces politics to the exclusively human domain of social interaction and aggregate while also radically bifurcating against the nonhuman world. Thus, Latour’s concern was that the double reduction of the nonhuman world, first by the founding fathers and again by the sociology of the social, led to a double-distanciation from what an alternative social science and, indeed, politics could be.

To be sure, this critique had methodological implications for the new materialism. “Power,” “social structure,” “regulatory law,” and “ideology” could no longer be presupposed or deployed as resources to explain social processes. Rather, these phenomena were themselves to be interrogated by exploring the things that help engender and sustain them. The point was to show that everyday things and their formative absences generate power. Thus, in no way does the literature on the new materialism defy structure and power. On the contrary, this literature claims that there is no reference to political Islam, modernization, ideology, social movements, institutions, globalization, neoliberalism, and state formation that is not simultaneously a reference to a particular order of nonhumans with which these phenomena are bound up. It is this insight that new materialists bring to the canon of structural analysis.

For instance, when Mitchell zooms in on the structuration of “democracy,” part of his goal is to show that materiality does not simply symbolize social hierarchies, reinforce structural inequalities, or reify structural differences.Footnote ⁶² Rather, materiality can be at the very origin of the different forms political systems take. Mitchell illuminates this by highlighting that the differences between two fossil fuels—coal (as solid material) and oil (as fluid material)—helped structure two distinct regimes of disciplinary techniques and thus two distinctive political systems in Europe and the Middle East, respectively.

Similarly, Anna Tsing’s exploration of the Matsutake mushroom points out that the symbiotic affordances of live matter can transform the structure of markets.Footnote ⁶³ Tsing’s mushrooms, which thrive in environmental distress in periphery states but are sold as high-value commodities in Japan, alert us to the possibility of a coming reorientation of the global capitalist economic system toward the production of surplus from environmental disaster and extinction. Her case study serves as a warning that, far from signaling the demize of capitalism, environmental disaster can help consolidate the structure of capitalism and, especially, its division of labor between core and periphery states that emerged through fifteenth-century colonialism and empire.

Likewise, when I explore the dynamism between materiality and language in Iran, it is to illustrate how different relationships between everyday objects and words bring about domination, rupture, and war as qualitatively distinct social structures, with each affording and foreclosing unique modes of political action.Footnote ⁶⁴ Other scholars, including Chandra Mukerji, Virág Molnár, and, not least, James Caron and Salman Khan, have shed light on how artifacts, plants, and the thingness of bodies help structure various phenomena, from the modern state to nationalism and war.Footnote ⁶⁵ The notion that an emphasis on materiality is opposed to the analysis of structure and power discards the constitutive ways in which materiality, structure, and power are interwoven. It also ignores the new materialist literature that provides nuanced analyses of these relationships.

The nature and social critique

The final critique holds that the new materialist goal of “obliterating the distinction between nature and the social” has numerous analytical and political consequences.Footnote ⁶⁶ David Bloor, a leading figure in the Edinburgh School, notes that explanation, critique, and scientific knowledge are only possible because of the separation between nature and the social. As Bloor explains, “it is important to separate nature from our description of it… [because] it is the description that is the topic of inquiry.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Prominent Marxist scholar Peter Osborne goes further, contending that the new materialism provides the main intellectual cover for the neoliberal project. This, he argues, is because politics is embedded in the social such that its dismantling leads to the kind of depoliticization that goes hand-in-hand with global neoliberalism. As such, Osborne insists on preserving the “distinctive sense of the social as an ontologically emergent domain, along with ‘nature’ as the name of the other side of the ontological difference.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Here, too, some of this criticism can be dispatched rather swiftly, as the “nature” Bloor and Osborne discuss is not as natural as they claim. The anomaly of the malaria epidemic in Egypt in the 1940s provides an illustrative example. To be sure, the Anopheles mosquito is part of nature, but the mosquito has a range of only two miles. To reach Egypt and infect over a million people, it needed its own vectors, including British military planes that flew on supply routes from West Africa and Sudan, where known mosquito colonies had taken root. In other words, the malaria epidemic and the British invasion of al-Alamein in Egypt were not two separate historical processes that connected on a social level; rather, they emerged through one another and enabled each other. The scientific division of labor that seeks to embed the mosquito and military force in the natural and social domains, respectively, may be appropriate for the task of the technical expertise that Bloor advocates. But as Mitchell reminds us, the limitations of technical expertise and its compartmentalization of different phenomena as natural or social are striking as soon as one begins questioning the kinds of human and nonhuman interactions that are actually transforming our world.

While the critique of “nature” has a long history dating back to feminist science studies in the 1960s, criticism of the idea of the social is more recent. The latter has gained traction, however, as scholars increasingly situate the concept’s development in its proper colonial history. To be sure, people have been thinking “socially” for a very long time. But the social came to life and was canonized as an analytical term in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at the height of global colonialism and imperialism. These historical conditions were not merely a backdrop to the social and its authors. Rather, the social and its proponents came to internalize colonial ways of thinking and representing the world. A key feature of colonialism was the construction of a strict ontological divide that framed nature and animals as fundamentally different from and inferior to the social and humans. This distinction was not a natural fact but an anthropocentric and speciesist knowledge system that colonial empires actively produced.Footnote ⁶⁹ One of the benefits of speciesism for colonialism was the animalization of non-Europeans in preparation for the deployment of systemic forms of violence and governance, including in Africa, where colonial control grew out of a reliance on an animal-human spectrum, and in India, where colonial legislation governed Indians as “criminal animals.”Footnote ⁷⁰ These are but a couple of examples of an array of global instances by which violence was enacted against colonized humans through the differentiating logic of the human and the social.

This speciesist knowledge system, with the human at its epicenter, also harnessed the modern social sciences that emerged in the nineteenth century. In sociology, for instance, Durkheim, Weber, and Marx helped solidify the social as a fundamentally human and Western enterprise. These “founding fathers” did this by emphasizing the structure and political order of urban and industrial societies such that nonhuman animals, along with non-Europeans, took on a subordinate role in sociological analysis.Footnote ⁷¹ George Herbert Mead’s forceful inscription of the human/animal divide based on language further hardened the social as the exclusive domain of politics, meaning, values, culture, consciousness, subjectivity, and reflectivity.Footnote ⁷² And, not least, Talcott Parsons’s goal of assembling a stable object of sociology led him to define the social quite unambiguously as the realm of human interaction, from which the nonhuman other was expelled.Footnote ⁷³ The social, as such, operated within the routinized and naturalized givenness of anthropocentrism, speciesism, and, all too often, Orientalism well into the twentieth century.

After Parsons, the question of what constitutes the social rarely surfaced until it was taken up by Latour in the 1990s and early 2000s.Footnote ⁷⁴ Although Latour’s work was initially reformist in that it sought to “reassemble” and thus preserve the notion of the social by generalizing the vocabulary of actors and agency to include material objects as key social players, his recent work, co-authored with Schultz, contains a more radical call to dismantle the concept of the social altogether.Footnote ⁷⁵ Here, part of Latour and Shultz’s goal is to develop an affirmative political framework that reckons with some of the most pressing issues of our time, including environmental disaster and multispecies genocide. In doing so, Latour and Schultz have replaced the social with the evolving notion of the ecological class, using the advantage of “class” as a historical concept that articulates political dynamics in terms of conflict and developing collective horizons. To speak of (the ecological) class, therefore, also means getting ready for some kind of battle. In this case, the battle is over maintaining the planet’s habitability.

This battle cannot be won without decolonized soil, plant, and animal futurities. As such, Latour and Schultz seek to consign a performative role to nonhumans subdued by previous regimes of the social in hopes of opening the possibility of alternative ecological alliances and political cosmologies, or an ecological class. From this perspective, the political subject is no longer fixed within the human and, as a result, the social can no longer monopolize politics. If humanist Marxists, including Osborne, are troubled by this idea, it is because they have mistakenly set forth the social domain as a universal space of sameness in which we need to find our political truth.Footnote ⁷⁶ By contrast, Latour and Schultz focus on what had to be externalized for the social and its anthropocentric, speciesist, and Orientalist politics to exist.

This affirmative turn toward extending Gramscian ideas of class conflict and mobilization to nonhuman players (e.g., soil, plants, and animals) is hardly an allegory for neoliberalism. On the contrary, First Nations, Indigenous peoples, and decolonial animal scholars and activists can gather around the ecological class to pursue coalition building with other diverse groups concerned with anthropocentrism, speciesism, and Orientalism in hopes of forming a shared politics with universalistic creeds oriented at defending the planet’s habitability. Perhaps, no new materialist theme is as timely and consequential as the dismantling of the social and the construction of an ecological class amid environmental disaster.

This does not mean, however, that concerns about the new materialism are without merit. Critics who support a shift away from the human as the measure of all things have pointed to object-domains within the canon of the new materialism that remain underdeveloped. Alireza Doostdar, for instance, calls for more attention to how memory affordances are linked to materiality and the production of objects.Footnote ⁷⁷ Younes Saramifar notes that a less Eurocentric approach to materiality is necessary, particularly in the field of Middle East studies.Footnote ⁷⁸ And Joel Gordon rightly points out that, for all its talk of objects, the new materialism does not immerse itself in “stuff” in a satisfactory manner.Footnote ⁷⁹ Such critiques do not undermine the new materialist canon but help move it in a more productive direction. Indeed, some of these concerns are taken up in the special issue “Materiality in Iran,” to which I turn next.

Materiality in Iran: An introduction

It would be presumptuous to say that this special issue brings materiality and Iran together. As noted above, a key part of the backstory of the new materialism unfolded in Iran. While it is doubtful that the political and intellectual feuds shaping the history of matter would have been the same without Ibn-e Sina’s Islamic philosophy, interest in nonhumans and materiality in Iran cannot be limited to Islamic traditions. Social science scholarship on Iran has a history of dealing with the more-than-human phenomena, including: Javad Safi Nezhad’s and Mostafa Azkia’s prolific writings on water affordances and land usage in rural Iran in the 1960s and 1970s; Richard Tapper’s work on the interwovenness of animals, land use, and power among Shahsevan nomads in northwestern Iran in the 1970s; Brian Spooner’s works on pastoral technology in Baluchistan and the political manifestation of Zayandah Rud in Isfahan in the 1970s and 1980s; Carol Kramer’s ethnoarchaeology of rural Iran in the 1980s; Leila Papoli-Yazdi’s archeology of garbage in marginal neighborhoods of Tehran in 2021; James Gutafson’s and Amit Sadan’s recent pioneering ecological histories of modern Iran; and, not least, Abbas Amanat’s growing focus on the material dimensions of Iran’s history and his special issue on “Environment and Culture.”Footnote ⁸⁰

During the 1980s, Spooner contributed to the now-classic volume on material culture, The Social Life of Things, exploring the transformations Persian carpets undergo as they move through global markets. By the mid-2000s, a cultural perspective on materiality had become a small but growing part of both Western and Iranian canons of Iranian studies, culminating in Pamela Karimi’s study of consumer culture in twentieth-century Iran and Abbas Kazemi’s analysis of everyday objects in revolutionary Tehran.Footnote ⁸¹

Over the past decade, however, a new generation of scholars from across the world has begun changing the conversation of materiality in Iran, decentering humans in their social analysis and focusing instead on the generative role of nonhumans in politics, culture, economy, religion, and beyond. Some of these scholars are featured in this special issue. Together, they expand our understanding of Iran’s history by showing its entanglements with the broader world of nonhumans. The themes these scholars pursue are wide-ranging, spanning from the nineteenth century to the present, and include an array of nonhuman actors, from heating technology and the material endpoints of digital platforms to dust, oil pipes, and bodies.

In the first article, Blake Atwood turns to the infrastructural and atmospheric world of artificial intelligence to show how Iran’s AI landscape emerges through material entanglements that belie state narratives of technological autonomy. Approaching AI not as an abstract computational achievement but as a dense assemblage of bodies, devices, and infrastructures, Atwood demonstrates how sanctions, global supply chains, and informal economies shape the physical substrates of Iran’s so‑called digital sovereignty. Smuggled GPUs, black‑market servers, gig‑economy labor, and the heat of Tehran’s streets co-produce an AI ecosystem whose material frictions unsettle triumphalist accounts of technological progress. Atwood shows that platforms similar to Uber such as Snapp—celebrated domestically as symbols of innovation—generate new forms of precarity by embedding workers and devices within extractive and surveillant infrastructures. By foregrounding the “intra-active” relations between algorithms, contingent objects, and laboring bodies, the article reframes AI in Iran not as a story of insulation or independence but as a revealing instance of how global neoliberal infrastructures manifest through matter, energy, and embodied work.

If Atwood’s analysis maps how large-scale technological systems engender Iran’s entanglement with global infrastructures, Zahra Manije Ghaznavian, Mohammad Reza Javadi Yeganeh, and I move this dynamic into the space of domesticity in “Colonizing Spatiality.” Here, we argue that the twentieth-century transformation of Iranian homes was materially driven by the introduction of portable heating technologies that re-scripted everyday life in subtle yet consequential ways. Focusing on the replacement of the traditional floor-based korsi with upright oil heaters such as the Aladdin, we show how heating technologies reorganized domestic space around verticality, enabling the arrival and normalization of Western consumer goods—chairs, beds, refrigerators—that required elevated postures and new forms of inhabitation. This spatial reconfiguration, we contend, enacted a quiet but pervasive mode of imperialism: an infrastructural civilizing mission embedded in the mundane objects of everyday life. As heating became portable, new spatial norms emerged that entangled Iranian domesticity with global capitalist circuits and tethered modern home life to the semi-periphery of the Western-dominated world economy. By centering the home as a site of techno-political encounter, our article illustrates how matter itself—rather than ideology or policy alone—mediated Iran’s encounter with hegemonic modernity, making spatial elevation a proxy for “civilizational progress.”

Continuing the interrogation of material infrastructures, Ciruce Movahedi-Lankarani focuses on the infrastructural ambitions of Pahlavi-era Iran through an examination of the Ahvaz pipe mill as a site at which industrial modernity was materially imagined, negotiated, and built. Through a detailed archival reconstruction of the 1960s IGAT-1 pipeline project, the article shows how the pipe mill was more than a technical adjunct to energy transport. It was, indeed, a contested symbol of Iran’s developmentalist aspirations. Here, the physical properties of steel, including its weight, volume, and form, shaped decisions about national planning, financing, and sovereignty. At stake was not only whether Iran could supply its own pipeline infrastructure, but how development itself would be materially constituted. State officials weighed the risks of domestic production against the promise of industrial autonomy, ultimately choosing to build the mill despite expert objections. Movahedi-Lankarani demonstrates how infrastructural form became a terrain of struggle over competing visions of the future: whether to prioritize immediate utility or long-term export potential, or whether to defer to expert technocracy or affirm sovereign ambition. The article foregrounds how pipes and steel sheets co-produced, by means of their sheer material presence, policy outcomes and national imaginaries. This history resists narratives of modernization driven by strong men, powerful authors, and ideology, emphasizing instead how developmental trajectories are forged through material entanglements. Rather than seeing the pipe mill’s delays and shortfalls as failures, the article reads them as evidence of how materiality mediates between desire and design. In doing so, the article exemplifies a key tenet of the new materialism: that matter is an active participant in shaping our political futures.

Extending this attention to how material forces co-produce labor, value, and infrastructural life in Iran, Amir Khorasani turns to opium as a nonhuman actor whose capacities have been profoundly misrecognized. While dominant state, medical, and Orientalist discourses cast opium as a substance that drains vitality and arrests productivity, Khorasani’s ethnography of the petrochemical zones of Asaluyeh reveals a strikingly different material politics: here, opium becomes a key component in sustaining the grueling bodily labor that fuels Iran’s energy economy. Through fine-grained accounts of workers who rely on opium to endure heat, exhaustion, and punishing shifts, the article reframes addiction not as individual pathology but as an elemental relation between bodies, industrial time, and chemical affordances. Opium, in this context, is neither metaphor nor moral failing but a labor technology—one that mediates the production of surplus value and anchors the rhythms of life in Iran’s capitalist margins. By foregrounding how the substance’s pharmacological properties intra-act with political economy, precarity, and the embodied temporality of work, Khorasani unsettles conventional binaries between productivity and intoxication while expanding materialist analyses of labor beyond tools, infrastructures, and commodities to include the chemical agents that make labor possible. This turn to the atmospheric and corporeal effects of a drug sets the stage for the next contribution, where material volatility shifts from opium’s chemical intensities to the dust-laden air of Iran’s borderlands.

Further developing the theme of material infrastructures and the lives they animate, Sana Chavoshian turns to dust as a volatile actor in Iran, demonstrating how sanctions, climate change, and environmental governance converge in the embodied experience of “breath sanctions.” Focusing on Khuzestan, a province marked by petrochemical industry, war scars, and cross-border dust storms, Chavoshian proposes “suspension” as a concept that captures both an atmospheric condition and a political modality. Here, dust is not mere pollution but a mobile, material force entangled with sovereignty, resistance, and the uneven burdens of climate and conflict. Through ethnographic engagement with farmers, engineers, and activists, Chavoshian shows how dust becomes the object of state control and citizen adaptation. State efforts to stabilize the soil through oil mulch, irrigation projects, and palm grove rehabilitation transform borderland ecologies into “Combat Dust Zones,” recasting environmental cooperation as acts of sovereign extension. Yet these interventions also unleash unintended effects: suffocating ecosystems, fostering mistrust, and evoking contested memories of war, dispossession, and failed promises of development. Foregrounding breathing as a multispecies act of survival, the article reframes sanctions as lived atmospheric violence. Dust thus shapes state power and its limits, revealing the fragility and improvisation underpinning environmental governance. By decentering human intentionality and tracing the political force of volatile matter, Chavoshian contributes to a new materialist vision of Iranian geopolitics attuned to the sensory, the suspended, and the more-than-human dynamics of life under pressure.

If dust unsettles the borders of sovereignty and breath, symbols and objects of national cohesion, including the Asiatic cheetah and the Iranian flag, bring environmental activists together in Iran. Here, Satoshi Abe turns to environmental activism to show its interweaving with matter, memory, and nationhood. Drawing on fieldwork in Tehran, Abe explores how nonhuman entities, far from being passive objects of representation, act as agents in the configuration of environmental discourse, generating affective ties that bind ecological degradation to collective imaginaries of Iranian identity. The Asiatic cheetah, nearly extinct and uniquely Iranian, becomes a “social agent” through which activists articulate a vision of environmental and national revival. Its endangered status is not just ecological but mnemonic, such that it conjures narratives of a once-prosperous Iran in harmony with its land. The national flag similarly exceeds its symbolic function, operating materially to organize environmental events and saturate public spaces with ambient nationalism. These things, from the animal to the emblem, are not static icons but sites of memory invoking Iran’s environmental past and reorienting collective attachment to its future. Abe thus shows how environmental activism in Iran is not reducible to technocratic rationality or global ecological frameworks, instead emerging from an Iranian grammar of nature in which materiality is interwoven with historical consciousness, bodily engagement, and affective investment. In centering this dynamic, the article offers a vital rejoinder to disembodied accounts of environmentalism, highlighting a situated materialism in which nature is always already national, historical, and lived.

Central to the new materialist canon is the claim that embodiment is not simply a vessel for experience but a dynamic site where histories, affects, and forces converge. It is through and with the body that material traces of power, violence, and memory persist. Maryam Ghodrati’s reading of Hassan Bani Ameri’s Gonjeshkha Behesht ra Mifahmand (Sparrows Understand Heaven), which was published in 57.4, exemplifies this orientation by showing how trauma is not merely represented but physically sedimented in the bodies and sensoria of its characters. Ghodrati argues that the novel resists narrative closure and state-sanctioned accounts of war by deploying a fragmented, color-saturated structure that mimics the non-linear and sensory quality of traumatic memory. The photojournalist-narrator, seeking truth through images, is repeatedly destabilized by scenes that exceed documentation, where violence is registered not through facts but through recurring sensations, bodily reactions, and the aesthetics of disintegration. Traditional modes of historical narrative give way to a poetics of haunting in which memory emerges in flashes: a head rolling across the ground or a voice on the phone that should be impossible. The novel’s interweaving of visual art forms such as Shamāyel Gardāni with conceptual dislocation reframes war literature not as commemoration but as a terrain of contested embodiment. Ghodrati thus underscores the force of affect and the limits of representation. In this view, the body becomes not just a witness to trauma but a site of its ongoing material production, unsettling any clean boundary between the lived and the remembered, the real and the narrated.

Taken together, the articles in this special issue mark a decisive shift in how materiality is understood, theorized, and narrated within Iranian studies. These authors refuse to treat matter as an inert backdrop or a mere context, instead showing how objects, bodies, infrastructures, atmospheres, and affects possess agential force, actively shaping the political, ethical, and epistemic contours of modern Iranian life. In doing so, these contributions challenge dominant scholarly habits privileging discourse, ideology, and representation, offering instead an attunement to how the material world pulses with history, power, and possibility. What emerges across these pages is not a single method or doctrine but a shared commitment to rethinking the boundaries between human and nonhuman, structure and sensation, and the visible and the felt. If the new materialism unsettles inherited ontologies, it does so not to erase meaning but to multiply. This analytical multiplication allows for a more capacious, more embodied, and more politically attuned scholarship that can help those interested in the intersection of academia and activism to paint a more inclusive political horizon. In this spirit, the contributions gathered here do not merely engage with materiality, they think with and through it, showing us that the task at hand is not to stand above the world but to dwell in its textures, frictions, and flows.