Postmodernism’s Material Turn

T.J. Martinson (bio)
Indiana University – Bloomington

A review of Breu, Christopher. The Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2014.

Halfway through The Insistence of the Material, Christopher Breu compares postmodernism to a zombie. Its death has been announced multiple times, yet it always manages to find a way out of the grave. Breu finds reason to be optimistic within this metaphor: “[W]e may find that the subject of postmodernism has transformed in undeath and that the features that were so prominent in life have now receded or taken on less importance, while other originally obscured characteristics seem now to emerge, producing an uncanny visage” (122). The book sets out to join the living and the dead, the familiar and unfamiliar.

In fact, the phrase “uncanny visage” functions quite well as a description for the book’s theoretical framework. Predicated on the interdisciplinary nature of biopolitics, or “the direct management of life and death by political and economic power” (2), The Insistence of the Material brings into conversation a wide array of canonical theorists—Freud, Marx, Jameson, Lacan, Derrida, Adorno, Foucault—alongside the relatively newer theories of materiality—object-oriented ontology, animal studies, biopolitics, the new materialism. His wide theoretical net is by no means an arbitrary flourish of scholarly prowess: Breu’s goal is not to abandon the cultural and linguistic turns at the heart of postmodernism, but instead to focus where such work cannot: “the forms of materiality that resist, exceed, exist in tension with the cultural and linguistic” (3). His book works to fuse together the old and the new, revisiting familiar postmodern texts while rethinking configurations of biopolitics.

Though he agrees with Foucault that the emergence of biopolitics long precedes the latter half of the twentieth century, Breu contends that the postmodern era provides an excellent ground for analysis as it is simultaneously “preoccupied with immateriality” and “defined by biopolitics” (2). Looking at the transition out of modernism alongside the transition into late capitalism, Breu identifies a distinct aesthetic within literary postmodernism that he deems the “late-capitalist literature of materiality,” and which, in contrast to the self-reflexivity of metafictional texts, “presents the issue of materiality as one of the core questions of contemporary existence” (23). In Chapter One, Breu takes up one of the foundational texts of experimental postmodernism, William Burrough’s Naked Lunch, a novel that he argues provides theoretical insight into “three different registers of materiality—linguistic, bodily, and political economic” (38). Chapter Two turns to Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V., to examine the complex dynamic at work between subject and object as read through biomedicalization, colonialism, and fetishism. Chapter Three focuses on J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash, particularly the novel’s representation of late capitalism in which material bodies become indistinguishable from their assertively industrialized environment, thereby providing a “dialectical flipside to the fantasies of material transcendence central to metafictional postmodernism” (97). Chapter Four looks to Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker for its attention to the materiality of the human body in death and its active resistance to biopolitical notions of performativity and control against the backdrop of San Francisco’s AIDS epidemic. The final chapter takes as its object Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and the novel’s negotiations between a late-capitalist world of overproduction and an ecological vision that attends to the material world.

As many of the theories of materiality that Breu cites are relatively new (especially as they relate to literary hermeneutics), there does not yet seem to be a set standard by which to perform a literary analysis of materiality. Breu capitalizes on this ambiguity by implementing various methodological approaches in each chapter and interpreting the “material” on micro and macro levels. When discussing Naked Lunch, for example, he examines the way in which Burroughs engages materiality through syntactic and semantic means, thereby centering the focus on material corollaries that arise from the idiosyncratic prose. In contrast to a material analysis of language, in the chapter on Ballard’s Crash, Breu performs a material analysis of the built environment depicted in the novel—an analysis he pairs with a reinvigorated configuration of Marx’s base/superstructure model. Breu’s varied approach to materiality works well for his purposes, in that it places an implicit emphasis on the similarities that carry through each analysis—the role of capitalism, politics, and medicalization in shaping biopolitics. His refusal to subscribe to a consistent material analysis might also serve as a suggestion that materiality’s “insistence” will reveal itself regardless of theoretical blinders.

The book could well be regarded as a successor to Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction (1987) in that Breu, too, calls for ontological treatment of similar texts. However, Breu breaks from McHale’s treatment of the author as “fantasized controller of the fiction, as the maker of worlds and subjects,” a supposition in which Breu finds “the humanist fetish that lurks behind posmodernism’s ostensible antihumanism” (105). In this instance and many others, he echoes the anticorrelationist paradigm prevalent in theories of materiality, especially object-oriented ontology (OOO), to which Breu gravitates, drawing substantially on two prominent theorists from the field, Levi Bryant and Graham Harman. It is at once a precarious and admirable endeavor—to denounce a human-centered, epistemological perspective while simultaneously explicating text objects for a predictably human audience. It is precisely this paradoxical situation that critics place at the center of their skepticism (cf. Andrew Cole’s “The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies”). Breu acknowledges the problematic by emphasizing the material world’s recalcitrance to human probing, while also noting that the limits of human inquiry do not provide a “reason to turn away from the attempt at such an account” (1). Here and elsewhere, Breu echoes the political and ethical imperative at the heart of Timothy Morton’s application of OOO. While Morton emphasizes the need to rethink global warming, Breu’s ethical compulsion is directed at the power dynamics that exert the greatest control over national biopolitics (notably, capitalism and biomedicalization). In this respect, the book builds on the ethical framework of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, which asserts the agency of the inanimate in political, medical, and environmental discourse. Breu complements Bennett’s argument with his added focus on thanatopolitics, the deadly inversion of biopolitics that inevitably accompanies it as a result of the ontological privileging that both Bennett and Breu argue against.

Throughout the chapters, Breu works to contrast his discussion of biopolitics with that of thanatopolitics, a concept developed by Robert Esposito for whom biopolitics, by its nature, privileges “one community, nation, or group as immune” (17); thanatopolitics, then, vindicates violence against those outside the privileged sector on the basis of “immunity.” The fragile distinction between biopolitics and thanatopolitics creates a fascinating dichotomy in each chapter. For instance, in his chapter on V., Breu discusses thanatopolitics in application to the famously odd scene in which Esther, a Jewish woman, gets a nose job from the plastic surgeon Schoenmaker. The martial language that underscores the description of her surgery, argues Breu, indicates the way in which wartime thanatopolitical practices continue throughout the postwar era under the guise of biopolitics, in this case, biomedical “correction” (69). The relationship of biopolitics to thanatopolitics is entirely different in his discussion of Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker. Here Breu writes that Bellamy’s refusal to conform to the homophobic rhetoric that pervaded discourse during the 1980s AIDs epidemic combats a thanatopolitical construction that conveniently places homosexuals at the epicenter of the disease (136).

The chapter on Bellamy deserves to be underscored as particularly important in its theoretical context. In this chapter, Breu best synthesizes theories of materiality with cultural criticism through his use of queer theory and feminist theory to discuss the ways the human body as physical phenomenon “elude[s] our fantasies of symbolic control” (32). Theories of materiality often face criticism for an intense focus on nonhuman actors while issues of race, sexuality, and gender continue to permeate political discourse. This chapter functions as a treatise of sorts, demonstrating how materiality can be thought through a cultural lens and culture through a materialist one. Breu performs a similar synthesis in his chapter on Silko’s Almanac of the Dead in which he reads the novel’s ecological vision of a “sustainable and just life” (159) in light of political-economic dynamics, thereby exploring ecological readings through Marxism. As in his chapter on Bellamy, Breu’s chapter on Silko brings new relevance to both ecological and Marxist theories by revealing how they shape each other in the context of late-capitalism.

In light of this summary, it should come as no great surprise that the book has a tendency to hop across theoretical spheres in a way that is at times dizzying. Moreover, through the inclusion of a wide theoretical base, important points of contrast between theories, especially the materialist theories—say, key points of difference between Ian Bogosts’s use of OOO and Bill Brown’s “material unconscious”—are taken largely for granted. Instead of fully attending to the differences responsible for demarcations within the umbrella of “theories of materiality,” Breu relies on their philosophical similarities when pairing these theories alongside canonical postmodern theory. Though it may not harm his argument outright, it does invite questions about the compatibility of specific theories with a synthetic, ontological understanding of postmodern texts. Perhaps this is the next step for scholars interested in developing understandings of materiality alongside postmodernism. Fittingly, Breu seems to anticipate this future work. In his conclusion he offers several propositions, among them a guiding principle for future applications: “Theory and critical thought should work to disrupt their fantasies of mastery while still attempting to be as adequate as possible to their objects” (190).

Not only does The Insistence of the Material ambitiously attempt to rethink familiar texts from late twentieth-century postmodernism, it also serves as an account of the ways in which postmodernism survives today—and not just as a zombie that refuses to die. At a moment when the humanities have largely turned to interdisciplinary approaches and exciting new syntheses to stake their relevance, Breu demonstrates that postmodernism is more than capable of contributing to the interdisciplinary discussion. In his conclusion he writes, “In order to deal with the challenges of the material turn and the growth of biopolitics, we need to be politically creative and theoretically impure” (194). Thus, to engage with and respond to the materialist turn is not a movement inward, but outward. In doing so, Breu makes visible how a new postmodernism rears its “uncanny visage.”

Works Cited

• Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. Print.
• Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2012. Print.
• Cole, Andrew. “The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontology.” The Minnesota Review 2013.80 (2013): 106–118. Web. 21 May 2016.
• McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1987. Print.