ABSTRACT
Key figures inspiring the new materialist turn acknowledge their debt to Marxism and varieties of Marxism. Yet it is striking how the enthusiastic claims for this approach presume its innovation rather than evaluate its relations with what it is understood to supersede. By contrast, the analyses undertaken in Chapters 9 and 10 indicated how both Perec and Saramago offer examples that demonstrate socialist, historical materialist commitments that are relevant and indeed attuned to current new materialist themes. I take these up in this as offering helpful political insights for the status of more-than-human analyses. Re-engaging the debates between ‘new’ and supposedly ‘old’ materialisms in the light of the insights emerging from the analysis of Perec’s and Saramago’s texts, it is suggested that – rather than being competing or successive – ‘old’ and ‘new’ varieties offer complementary insights that usefully inform and amplify each other’s analyses. Topicalising ‘silly’ as well as ‘new’ materialisms, the chapter then moves to discuss Lenin’s pamphlet, significantly originally entitled ‘The Infantile Sickness of “Leftism” in Communism’. A Child as method reading here works to revise the disparaging and pathologising notions of ‘disorder’ and ‘infantile’ to reclaim these as resources for political modes of engagement aligned with feminist and decolonial activisms. This reading thus highlights materiality and materialism as inevitably cultural-historical and political in construction, even – or perhaps especially – when they are understood as ‘natural’. The practice of Child as method in this book therefore disorders prevailing orderings of child and childhood, diagnoses and discloses further geopolitical efficacies, and – hopefully – invites new possibilities.
