ABSTRACT
We are in the social and human sciences in the midst of "the material turn" with a focus on non-humans, objects, things replacing the former paradigm dubbed by Richard Rorty as "the linguistic turn" (1967) concerned with words, stories, narratives, enunciations. In the material turn there is a focus on materials in many different shapes and forms and often the scholars explicitly reject to take humans and their embodied collective consciousness into their scrutiny of material ontologies. The most extreme theoretical exploration of the material turn deals with what a heterogeneous group of philosophers has named object-oriented ontology (OOO). Here we find a concern for what Timothy Morton has called "hyperobjects" (2013). These objects challenge the cultural-historical theories, which after all are concerned with human reasoning, learned perceptions and thinking in so far hyperobjects are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans (Morton 2010, 2013). These objects are completely beyond human control and indeed comprehension whether they are made by humans or not. Though meant to facilitate our thinking about the materially incomprehensible, hyperobjects, like many new materialist concepts, become ontology without thinking humans. This leaves collective politics at an impasse. I see a revised version of the Vygotskyan framework as absolutely impertinent for bringing back an activist transformative agency (Stetsenko 2016) with a critical view of the how "matter come to matter" (Hasse 2015a).
