Matter and Motion: A Brief History of Kinetic Materialism

Thomas Nail traces an alternative history of ancient and modern thinkers who share a radically different understanding of the nature of matter and motion compared to the rest of the Euro-Western tradition. From Archaic Greek poetry and Bronze Age Minoan religion to the Roman poet Lucretius, and from German philosopher Karl Marx and English writer Virginia Woolf to contemporary physicists Carlo Rovelli and Karen Barad, Nail identifies a minor tradition of what he calls 'kinetic materialism' and its three central ideas: indeterminacy, relationality and process. For the most part, Western thinkers have considered matter and motion to be inferior to more formal and static principles. Philosophers placed metaphysical categories such as eternity, God, the soul, forms and essences at the 'top' of a hierarchy that secured and ordered the movement at the bottom. This has real consequences in our world. By placing stasis above motion, this hierarchy places form above matter, life above death, God above humans, humans above nature, men above women, white skin above brown skin, the first world over the third world, citizens above migrants, straight above queer… The result? Patriarchy, capitalism, racism, homophobia, ecocide. Nail seeks to undermine this inherited hierarchy and the notion that matter and motion are inferior. There are no fixed authorities. This new history of matter and motion leaves the good life up to us, whoever we may become.