New Materialism and the Planetary Turn: From Quantum Mechanics to Plant Life

This essay discusses the Foucauldian concept of ‘environmentality’ in relation to the recent ‘planetary’ and ‘animal’ turns in the social sciences and humanities. The essay critically engages Lemke's recent interpretation of Foucault's idea of a ‘government of things’ in relation to the theses of ‘new materialism,’ in particular those proposed by Barad. In the post-Foucauldian discourse, dispositifs or apparatuses are that through which the environment governs us at the same time as we interact or intra-act with it. Our article proposes a critical approach to this discourse on the apparatus based on the recent efforts to take into consideration animal and plant subjectivity in philosophy and political theory. Comparing and contrasting Barad's ‘relational’ interpretation of quantum mechanics with the one proposed by Kojève, we argue that Barad's discourse on the apparatus cannot be universalized to the biological subject and the idea of the milieu or habitat. The essay then asks how a consideration of the profoundly post-human planetary dimension of history and the problem of the ‘habitability’ of planets changes the post-Foucauldian understanding of habitat and milieu. We argue that a posthuman approach to life from the perspectives of animals, plants, fungi and microbes requires a different understanding of our relation to reality than the one mediated by apparatuses.