All materialisms are 'new' materialisms
"I would suggest, though, that there is a sense in which all materialisms are ‘new’ materialisms, and this is because there very notion of materiality must have a gestural or oppositional component. One might say that any intellectual movement must be somewhat uncharitable to its previous generation in order to establish a difference, and one might also say that intellectual movements as such come in dialectical response to each other; after years of insisting on the importance of social and linguistic construction, one would turn back to materiality, and then perhaps be critical of a too-immediate emphasis on matter. That may be so, but there is something about the problem of feminist materiality that is far more insistent than the standard philosophical squabbles that toggle back and forth between idealism and realism , or historicism and absolutism (or any other series of conflicts and oppositions). If one looks over the debates regarding matter, materialism and materiality o