Nature, Neoliberalism, and New Materialisms

This book explores the blurred boundaries between language and matter, cognition and thing, living and inanimate, technology and nature, which is the neoliberal way of governing the unpredictable. Adorno and the concept of form of life provide a way to claim the irreducibility of reality to its description and of nature to mere environment.

For a long time Western reason, of which capitalism embodies the most accomplished and radical form, seemed able of acquiring a growing capacity to control the world. Social turmoil and the ecological crisis appear to question such capacity, while in social theory ‘new materialisms’ are committed to denounce its engine – the separation and hierarchization of subject and object, language and matter, cognition and thing, living and inanimate, technology and nature. But what if, with new biotechnologies, geoengineering, ecosystem services, human enhancement, artificial intelligence, and more, the overcoming of this separation is celebrated, and world domination increasingly hinges on the unpredictable? Nature, Neoliberalism and New Materialisms: Riding the Ungovernable brings this elusive strategy into focus, reconstructing its genealogy and showing its correspondence with neoliberal governmental rationality. If anti-dualism is endorsed by an increasingly pervasive logic that panders to, and incites, planetary turbulence in order to extract value, how to combat it? Sticking with, or returning to, traditional naturalism does not work. One is rather to build on the irreducibility of the real to its description, and of nature to mere environment. A theoretical key lies in Adorno and in the concept of form of life, while prefigurative activism constitutes a promising field of experience.

For a long time Western reason, of which capitalism embodies the most accomplished and radical form, seemed able of acquiring a growing capacity to control the world. Social turmoil and the ecological crisis appear to question such capacity, while in social theory new materialisms are committed to denounce its engine the separation and hierarchization of subject and object, language and matter, cognition and thing, living and inanimate, technology and nature. But what if, with new biotechnologies, geoengineering, ecosystem services, human enhancement, artificial intelligence, and more, the overcoming of this separation is celebrated, and world domination increasingly hinges on the unpredictable? Nature, Neoliberalism and New Materialisms: Riding the Ungovernable brings this elusive strategy into focus, reconstructing its genealogy and showing its correspondence with neoliberal governmental rationality. If anti-dualism is endorsed by an increasingly pervasive logic that panders to, and incites, planetary turbulence in order to extract value, how to combat it? Sticking with, or returning to, traditional naturalism does not work. One is rather to build on the irreducibility of the real to its description, and of nature to mere environment. A theoretical key lies in Adorno and in the concept of form of life, while prefigurative activism constitutes a promising field of experience.

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