Daina Coole and Samantha Frost (Eds), 2010, "New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics." Duke University Press.
For new materialism, the matter is not inert, passive, waiting for the rational subject, human beings, to act onto it. Matter in new materialism is, moreover, not another realm distinctive from the rational-human realm. In more precise words, both material and rational beings, sentient and non-sentient, animals and humans, rocks and programmed robots belong to the same ontology, to the same realm but with difference in degree not in kind.
We have got used to thinking of the non-human, the non-organ, the matter as that category we can mold; it is separate from the rational, from the intellect, and it is, essentially, totally alien to the free will. This understanding is mainly rooted in Descartes's dualism: human/nature; object/subject, and so on. New materialism subverts this dualism.
When the rational subject, the human being, faces the sea, the sea - according to the material and Cartesian philosophy - is a matter that can be exploited, discovered, used by the rational subject (who is free) in multiple ways: sailing, fishing, swimming, diving, etc. For the new materialist, the sea is not the inert matter which is totally and essentially determined (in terms of its usage) by the rational subject. The sea itself has an agency, a transformative power which unfolds as it interacts with the rational subject. The sea enables human beings to sail, to swim, and it per se determines how it can be used and by itself forms possibilities that rational subjects can actualize some and fail to actualize others. In the same way, other material, organic and non-organic objects/subjects can materialize some possibilities that the sea offers and fail to actualize others. The sea has an agency as much as we have. The sea agency and the human agency interact with each other. The sea kills. The sea allows, permits humans to move from a land to another. The sea permits a surface of wood or a wide surface of iron to float. The sea balances the atmosphere of the Earth and it harbors living entities that impact humans and non-humans. These aspects are agentic. They existed before a human being has ever existed, and they, indeed, pre-conditioned the human realm.
The materials are not simple. When we talk about seas, we can imagine how much complexity is associated with the sea as a material: lodging wood, building ships, overseas colonization, globalization, total economic systems, and so on. When we think of cement, we reach the same conclusion. Cement has its own agency and its own transformative power that unfolds in this world by interacting with humans and non-humans. By doing so, it generates unpredictable phenomena: housing, environmental pollution, urbanization, and many political and economic repercussions. Thus, new materialism is the philosophy of non-linearity and of complexity.
To conclude, we may start to think of the materials, the matter, as something that precedes the intellectual subject, and that the intellectual subject is always embedded in the matter and acts and thinks within it. The matter itself is not limited and finite. In the past it gave birth to the human being, to the rational subject, and it continues to give birth to the universe, making it wider than itself. The matter is that aura making the universe (i.e., the actual) more than what it is. Imagine, then, how much the matter is omnipresent and creative. The real, which is signified by the matter, is always and essentially bigger that the actual, which materializes gradually as the transformative power of the matter unfolds. We can think of the matter as a site of infinite possibilities that we can actualize some and fail to actualize other because we do not have control over it fully, as the agency of the matter itself also forms us, we the human beings.
