ABSTRACT
The term new materialism is undoubtedly a term coined in reaction to the contemporary ubiquity of the digital. In this light, it would be worth reeling back and reflecting on this term. For in the age of abundant neologisms and acronyms, we tend to be heedlessly accepting of newfangled terms, if we are not simply inured to them. For how can matter be new? If we subscribe to a non-idealist position, matter is what is prior to us, and our own first experiences are of and as matter, hence “brute” matter. The “new” in this term, then, is a highly reactionary addition, an exhortation to believe, to remember, and to return. This last, the return, is more than a faint revival of a Heideggerian Umkehrung, a turning back to fundamentals, redolent of the National Socialist call to “blood and soil.” Any invocation of a fundamentalism, essentialism, apriorism, is fundamentally violent—and banal. This chapter takes the obverse side of the “where” thematic of this book by deconstructing and invalidating new materialism in art as a neoconservative sentimentalism based on superannuated and ultimately noxious premises.
