New Materialism: Agency and Vitality of Things

Core Idea

New materialism contests the anthropocentrism of humanistic criticism by arguing that non-human things and materials possess their own forms of agency and vitality. Objects, substances, and environments are not merely passive contexts but active participants in the world. Literary texts reveal how things and materials shape human experience and how recognizing non-human agency transforms ethical and political imagination.

Explainer

From posthumanist criticism you know that humanism's privileged human subject — rational, autonomous, the source of meaning — has been challenged by theory that decenters the human within networks of power, language, and biology. New materialism takes this challenge in a specific direction: it argues that the problem isn't just the *human* at the center but the *subject* — the assumption that agency, intention, and vitality are properties that belong to minded beings and not to matter itself.

The central provocation of new materialism is vibrant matter — Jane Bennett's term for the lively, thing-power inherent in non-human objects and assemblages. Consider how electrical grids, food systems, or pharmaceutical chemicals shape human behavior, mood, and political possibility. These are not passive objects that humans use; they are participants in assemblages that produce effects no individual human intended or controls. Bennett's analysis of the 2003 North American blackout traces how a cascade of non-human forces — transmission lines, software protocols, electrons — conspired to produce an outcome that no human agent planned. The grid acted. Matter had effects. Agency, in this framework, is not a property of human will but an emergent property of material assemblages.

For literary study, new materialism opens a different set of reading questions. Rather than asking what a text says about human consciousness or social relations, it asks: what do objects, environments, and materials *do* in this text? How does the house, the letter, the medication, the weather act on characters, plot, and meaning? This is a different question from the symbolism one — new materialism is not asking what the object represents but what it effects. In Dickens, the fog doesn't just symbolize corruption; it physically clogs lungs, impedes movement, obscures vision, and produces a population that behaves differently because of it. The fog is an agent in the story.

The ethical and political implications extend beyond literary analysis. If matter has agency — if things act, if environments shape behavior, if materials are participants rather than mere context — then the ethical circle must expand beyond humans and even beyond sentient creatures to include material systems. Climate change is the most pressing case: it requires thinking about non-human forces as actors in the full sense, not just as threats to human welfare. New materialism gives literary criticism a framework for reading texts that take seriously the agency of the more-than-human world, and for developing an ethics adequate to inhabiting a planet where matter acts back.