Abstract:

The “self-expression of matter” is a core concept in contemporary Continental New Materialism’s reconstruction of ontology. Drawing on recent advances in the natural sciences, New Materialism posits languages pertaining to physical apparatuses and living individuals and seeks to establish a “material-discursive” framework distinct from human language, thereby furnishing ontological justification for contemporary intelligent information technologies. Yet even though the proposition of “material expression” bridges the rupture between the speaking agent and the matter spoken of, it falls prey to the trap of scientism. Internally, it perpetuates an epistemological tradition of constructing oppositional binaries, reinforces an exclusionary logic of “the one who overcomes versus that which is overcome, ” and in practice amplifies unipolar tendencies and the fetishization of matter within a society of singularities. To dispel the obscuring effects of New Materialism’s “monologue of matter, ” we must trace the historical agency of technical objects, thereby revealing the political- economic forces operative within material practice. We must then draw anew on the Chinese notion of “resonance between the self and things” (wu-wo gantong) to pursue, in the intelligent age, an existential wisdom of “transforming things without being reified by them.”

Key words: material-discursive, monologue of matter, technical objects, resonance between the self and things (wu-wo gantong)