Neomaterialism

= " 'neo' or 'new' materialism, which treats matter as animated". [1]

Please note that other authors sharply distinguish these 2 concepts: Neomaterialism vs New Materialism

Description

Michael Fisch:

"While building on traditional materialism, the “neo” of neomaterialism denotes a post-vitalist proposition whereby what animates matter is explained through theoretical physics rather than attributed to a spirit or essence.

At the same time, neomaterialism wants to move beyond the social constructivist under-standing of matter offered by Marx as well as think in non-dialectics terms that, in opposition to conventional historical materialism, allow for an emergence without the presupposition of a negative force. But at its core, neomaterialism is an ethical project that develops an alternative conceptual premise to civil liberal society that is founded on the valorization of reason and the agency of the autonomous rational subject who organizes nature into civilization (Coole and Frost 2010, 66).In pursuing this goal, neomaterialism recognizes that material things a reactive participants in the creation of order in the world. Neomaterialism thus echoes Latour’s call in actor–network theory (ANT) for the recognition of nonhuman agency. But neomaterialism also aims to go beyond Latour’s thesis, specifically by articulating an inherent ethics of material entanglements.

The neo-materialist argument is thus that matter displays self-organizing emergent properties that tend toward increasingly complex configurations and ecologies. As such, it demands that we acknowledge that human beings are merely participants in rather than masters over a complex ontological entanglement from which emerges a shared design for (human and nonhuman) lived reality. In other words, the argument is that there is a force of design irreducible to human intellectual reason. Design is understood rather as a system of organization that emerges from material itself. Ingold captures something of this approach when he suggests that materialism calls “for an alternative account of building, as a process of working with materials and not just doing to them, and of bringing form into being rather than merely translating from the virtual to the actual."

(https://www.academia.edu/31622933/The_Nature_of_Biomimicry_Toward_a_Novel_Technological_Culture_