One of the things I’ve found striking in this discussion is the tendency for people to call themselves “materialists” so long as they are committed to the claim that discursive practices are material. I guess the idea is that idealism focuses on ideas and thought, whereas materialism focuses on practices. I’m all for focusing on practices and I agree that they’re material, but I don’t think this is sufficient for claiming the title of “materialism”. I even had one respondent claim that discursive practices literally bring entities into existence. In other words, for this person no entities existed prior to discursive practices and no entities will exist after discursive practices. Wow! I fail to see how such a position can, in any possible universe, be called a materialism. Rather, to qualify as materialist I believe a position must be reject anthropocentrism and be posthumanist. The rejection of anthropocentrism refuses to grant humans any privileged place in assemblages. Humans are certainly important to humans and clearly we’ll be talking about humans quite a bit when we do social and political theory, but they enjoy no ontological privilege. The world or being exists apart from humans, existed before humans, and will exist after humans.
— Construction and Materialism (via @ibogost)
