Matter Materialized
„Matter Materialized“, paper given at conference on „New Materialism“, „Matter Matters. The Social Sciences Beyond the Linguistic Turn“ University, Lund, Sweden, 2012.
Loose Train of Arguments around the false opposition of Cartesian Idealism and scientific "reductive Materialism".
The specifically human dimension of materiality is the assemblage of artificial life-worlds, social interaction, interior states and natural and artificial surroundings, taken as a whole without totality (as exemplified by both Üxküll and Latour).
In order to honour both human subjectivity (of the Modern Western type) and the new focus on "the material" in science and humanities I propose the use of Bourdieu's concept and methodological tool of "habitus". Any habitus is always already a subjectivity emerging from objective conditions, and an objective space of resonance in order for subjectivity to be acquired and maintained. Habitus is also always already shared in a state of social and material co-evolution.
In a final step I criticize the academic habitus as milieu of "New Materialism" rendering it yet one more fashion that cannot do justice to the matter at hand (a criticism that has been confirmed during the 5 years since the paper has been written).
In a final outlook I propose "inertia" as a guiding non/concept to materialize shared human materiality in an act of residence beyond the fashions of discourse.
