From Cultural to New Materialism and Back: The Enduring Legacy of Raymond Williams

The impact of a line of interdisciplinary thinking collectively known as ‘new materialism’ has been highly significant across the humanities, social sciences and beyond in recent years. In proposing an immanent theory of matter, new materialists enfold a great deal of ‘posthuman’ thinking. In this essay, elements of the new materialism are explored in relation to the older tradition of ‘cultural materialism’. The essay argues that new materialism – in so thoroughly disavowing the human – overlooks the central concept of intention, and in so doing risks a too limited and barren form of materialism, and that by returning to the notion of intention championed by Raymond Williams, cultural materialism has much to contribute to the current materialist resurgence.