摘要：For those of us old enough to have had the ‘benefit’ of a ‘Marxist adolescence’, the very idea that contemporary philosophers and social theorists should now want to re-examine the relationship between ‘sociality’ and ‘materiality’ may strike as rather odd. This is because for an inveterate Marxist, grosso modo, human life is at root material; to the extent that in the archetypal Marxist ‘last instance’ it is materiality that directly conditions all forms of emergent sociality. However, the widespread loss of faith in this metaphysics has been one of the prime causes of Marxism’s recent intellectual emaciation and the growing sense that its simplistic materialism was merely a ribald déformation professionelle of the Marxist scholar (rudely designed pour épater les bourgeois). As a consequence it has become clear to many that Marxist thinkers had not attended to this issue with due philosophical diligence and that the relationship between the social and the material is more much compossible than Marxists were prepared to recognise.
