ABSTRACT
This chapter returns the book’s focus to discussions of materialism, including human-matter relations. By ‘more-than-human’, I signal discussions of human–animal and human–technology relations, as well ecologies of living (and dead) matter that include humans among many others. A Child as method attention to modes and orders of spatialities and temporalities, as they are mobilised and organised around intergenerational relationships informs a review of the relations between so-called new and older varieties of materialism. Further, it offers ways of reconciling some of the antagonisms between these, to demonstrate alignments and mutualities. The chapter first considers how debates on materialism connect with debates on changes in class composition and identifications wrought through transformations in modes of labour from industrial to late capitalism, the latter significantly sometimes termed ‘immaterial labour’. It outlines the rise of new materialist approaches, especially as they have come to influence childhood and educational studies, before considering key limitations indicated especially by feminist and decolonial critics. A rationale is offered for focusing on the mid-twentieth-century French author, Georges Perec and Portuguese writer, José Saramago. This account of the debates about materialisms sets the frame for the substantive re-evaluation presented in Chapter 11 in the light of the analysis presented in Chapters 9 and 10. Similarities and differences in the philosophical, as well as political, orientations of these two authors are considered in relation to their individual biographies and specific sociopolitical contexts.
