What is new in new materialism for a newcomer?

Abstract

Having recently emerged as an intellectual project, new materialism (NM) is extending to different fields, including sport, exercise and health studies. However, it is still unclear why and how NM is new, which can jeopardise its potential impact in academia and society. The aim of this paper is to discuss the newness of NM and to explore how it plays out in relation to different issues, such as knowledge translation and partisan positions. At the same time, NM is used as a way of understanding my own positionality as a newcomer who is becoming an academic within a field having manifold intellectual debates while being shaped by a neoliberal rationality. Reasons as to why NM has to be more concerned about accessibility are provided, and a case for a receptive yet suspicious attitude towards the label ‘new’ is made. Several key points that might help newcomers start thinking with the ‘new’ are also highlighted. Next, an example of NM in action is presented. This section illuminates what NM brings to my research practice and, more specifically, how I re-created a concept that worked and is still working for me in my research on exercise and disability. The article closes by offering strategies to resist the neoliberal academic assemblage and inviting sport and exercise researchers to partake in collective environments that support the developing of new ways of thinking and becoming.

Keywords:

• New materialism
• ontological turn
• post-qualitative inquiry
• post-humanism
• early career academics

Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful to Víctor Pérez, José Devís and Brett Smith for their ongoing mentorship. I also thank the anonymous reviewers whose constructive comments have helped improve the manuscript. All remaining slippages, contradictions and overgeneralisations are entirely my own.

Notes

1. Feely (2016) provides an excellent new materialist discussion on essentialism in disability studies. He focuses on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) anti-essentialist ontology of assemblage.

2. A fragment of the short story ‘Where I’m calling from’ by Raymond Carver helped me understand Bennett’s idea: ‘He sat down at one end of the sofa, and she sat down at the other end. But it was a small sofa, and they were still sitting close to each other’.

3. For a useful introduction to postphenomenology as an alternative to the flat ontology of NM, see Aaagard (2017). He presents the radical symmetry of NM as a pitfall, insofar as the breakdown of distinctions between humans, non-humans and signs ‘ultimately leaves unexplored the differences between such elements of practice’ (9). Though closely aligned with material-semiotic versions of NM, such as Haraway’s nature-cultures and Latour’s actor network theory, postphenomenology reinstates human beings at the forefront, albeit in a renewed, posthumanist sense. ‘While not going so far as to claim that technologies have any agency in themselves, this approach insists that agency is distributed across human beings and technologies’ (9). This means a distinction, but not a separation, between human and non-human entities.

4. The dialogical narrative approach focus on the mutual constitution of stories and the people who tell them. This perspective understands people as inherently relational, and storytelling as part of a dialogue between two or more voices (Frank 2010). Originally formulated by Mazzei (2013), the concept of Voice without Organs allows us to think dialogue differently, that is, decoupled from its humanist subject. According to this new materialist concept, voice is part of the ‘assemblage … of human and nonhuman agents that exceeds the traditional notion of the individual’ (734).