Enriching Discourse Theory: The Discursive-material Knot as a Non-Hierarchical Ontology: A Reply to Nico Carpentier

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 385-389
Author(s):  
Mads Ejsing ◽  
Lars Tønder
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Theory ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
The Relationship

In this reply, we question whether 'the knot' is the best way to describe the relationship between the discursive and the material. Our main objective is to show that the discursive and material are co-extensive and therefore emerge from within the same assemblage, prior to any 'knot' between them. To develop this idea, we draw on the new materialism of Karen Barad and Jane Bennett, especially their argument for how and why it makes sense to approach the discursive and the material as hyphenated ('discursive-material') as well as performatively constituted.

New Materialism and the New History of Emotions

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-183
Author(s):  
Katie Barclay
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Expression Of Emotion ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Relationship

A key question for historians of emotion has been the relationship between the expression of emotion and the corporeal experience of emotion by historical subjects. Recently, work indebted to practice and performance theories has emphasised language’s productive capacities to produce emotion performatively. New Materialism extends this conversation by suggesting an alternative imagining of ‘matter’ – the corporeal – which attributes it greater agency in systems of discursive production. This article explores in particular the work of theorist Karen Barad and the implications of her work for the history of emotions.

Old Media, New Gigs: The Discursive Construction of the Gig Economy in Australian News Media

2021 ◽  
pp. 095001702110346
Author(s):  
Luci Pangrazio ◽  
Cameron Bishop ◽  
Fiona Lee
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Discourse Theory ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Gig Economy ◽  
Cultural Imaginary ◽  
Short Term Contract ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Work And Life

This article analyses the representation of the gig economy in three Australian newspapers from 2014 to 2019. ‘Gig work’ is defined as short term, contract or freelance employment and is seen by many social institutions as the future of work. Drawing on a corpus of 426 articles, Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory is used to examine the construction of the ‘gig economy’ in the cultural imaginary. Five key elements emerge, including: demographics of workers; working conditions; workers’ rights; resistance and regulation; and change and disruption. Despite multiple competing discourses evident across the newspapers, each constructs the gig economy as an inexorable phase in the evolution of the relationship between capital and the worker. The article critically analyses the construction of the discourse, including the difficulties of regulating gig economy platforms and the narrative of inevitability used to describe changes to work and life brought about by technology.

The Head, the Hand, and Matter: New Materialism and the Politics of Knowledge

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 49-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Rekret
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Do So

This article seeks to examine the political connotations of a recent ‘material turn’ in social and political theory and its implications for theorizations of political agency. ‘New materialist’ theories are premised upon transcending the limits which social constructivism places upon thought, viewed as a reification of the division of subject and object and so a hubristic anthropocentrism which places human beings at the centre of social existence. Yet new materialist theories have tended to locate the conditions of the separation of mind and world they seek to overcome upon the terrain of epistemic or ethical error. By taking the work of Quentin Meillassoux, Jane Bennett and Karen Barad as exemplary, this article contends that new materialist theories not only fall short of their own materialist pretensions insofar as they do not interrogate the material conditions of the separation of the mental and material, but that the failure to do so has profound repercussions for the success of their accounts of political agency. This essay seeks to offer a counter-narrative to new materialist theories by situating the hierarchy between thought and world as a structural feature of capitalist social relations.

Quantum Creativity: Afracting New Materialism in the Anthropocene

2021 ◽  
pp. 107780042110666
Author(s):  
jan jagodzinski
Keyword(s):  
Creative Destruction ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Quantum Level ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Karen Barad

This essay engages the vicissitudes of new materialism at the quantum level, attempting to differentiate what I take to be fundamental differences in the theoretical positions of vitalist theories as developed by Karen Barad and Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the Anthropocene. I treat matter at the quantum level to differentiate conceptions of apparatus and assemblage. It is argued that one should not treat them under the same signifiers. There is the question of creativity that runs through the essay which also raises questions concerning an “affirmative” Deleuze, the dominant position when it comes to the arts, humanities, and pedagogy. Against these particular developments, anorganic life as in|different comes to fore where issues of creative destruction must be faced.

Werewolf Wollstonecraft

2020 ◽  
pp. 253-274
Author(s):  
Chris Washington
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
Dynamic Power ◽  
Karen Barad

The judicial bestiary at the heart of eighteenth-century politics has long been evident in Enlightenment social contract debates, as Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theories of biopolitics show. In this essay, I argue that Wollstonecraft is nonetheless the first thinker of ‘true’ werewolf out-lawry in her final novel, Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman and in her letters to Godwin. In the novel, Wollstonecraft leverages what we now call new materialism as a feminist critique of heteropatriarchal society. Wollstonecraft’s new materialist thinking also scrambles gender across even human and nonhuman distinctions. To counter microcosmic familial and macrocosmic state heteropatriarchy, Wollstonecraft theorizes what I am calling, following the example of wolves and werewolves, not a family but a ‘pack’. The pack manifests as new spacetimes through what Karen Barad terms “quantum entanglements” that produce love between subjects and subjects but that never strives to reproduce binaristic pairings that reproduce the sovereign family. A pack, as Wollstonecraft’s texts demonstrate, emerges from processes of co-creation that iterate new subjects and objects without dynamic power structures structured around stable gender identities or human and nonhuman power relations.

scholarly journals The possibilities and limits of political contestation in times of ‘urban austerity’

Urban Studies ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (9) ◽  
pp. 2087-2106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crispian Fuller ◽  
Karen West
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
City Government ◽  
Discourse Theory ◽  
Policy Area ◽  
Planning Policy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Social Logics ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This paper seeks to provide a conceptual framework in which to examine the social practices of contemporary austerity programmes in urban areas, including how these relate to different conceptions of crisis. Of current theoretical interest is the apparent ease with which these austerity measures have been accepted by urban governing agents. In order to advance these understandings we follow the recent post-structuralist discourse theory ‘logics’ approach of Glynos and Howarth (2007), focusing on the relationship between hegemony, political and social logics, and the subject whose identificatory practices are key to understanding the form, nature and stability of discursive settlements. In such thinking it is not only the formation of discourses and the mobilisation of rhetoric that are of interest, but also the manner in which the subjects of austerity identify with these. Through such an approach we examine the case of the regeneration/economic development and planning policy area in the city government of Birmingham (UK). In conclusion, we argue that the logics approach is a useful framework through which to examine how austerity has been uncontested in a city government, and the dynamics of acquiescence in relation to broader hegemonic discursive formations.

Oh, go to sleep, honey. If you want some chills – you got it. On affect in ASMR

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-325
Author(s):  
Joanna Łapińska
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Karen Barad

In the article, the author discusses a new cultural phenomenon known as ASMR in a posthuman perspective, especially from the perspective of new materialism (Karen Barad), studies of things (Bjørnar Olsen, Ewa Domańska) and affective studies (Jane Bennett, Sara Ahmed). The article analyzes selected ASMR videos published on the YouTube website in terms of the affectivity of the objects used in them, arguing that ASMR cultural practices encourage the production of human-non-human assemblages of subjects and objects built of “vibrating matter” (Jane Bennett).

A Horse Is a Horse, Of Course, Of Course: Animality, Transitivity, and the Double Take

Somatechnics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-47
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Barker
Keyword(s):  
Animal Movement ◽  
Human Movement ◽  
Slow Motion ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Running Time ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Feminist New Materialism ◽  
Work Done ◽  
Dividing Line

Lanthimos's The Lobster (2015) invites a way of looking that coincides with work done by scholars of feminist new materialism with an eye toward queering binary and static concepts of species, gender, and the relation between them. A close look at one fleeting, slow-motion image of horses racing on a track reveals a pattern of ‘diffraction,’ in the critically productive sense that Karen Barad uses the term, such that we see neither camera movement, human movement, nor animal movement proper, but movement that is ‘of’ all three bodies, but not ‘in’ any given one. The film perpetually defers the dichotomy between animal and human as it is classically conceived in order to reconfigure it.That diffractive pattern recurs throughout the film, in its use of slow motion, lateral camera movements, and the overlapping of multiple movements and rhythms. Throughout its running time, The Lobster suspends the process of becoming in motion, emphasizing the experiential aspect of this ‘-ing’ that bodies do. The film draws vision sideways, rippling and redoubling itself; in the process, it shifts attention from a human state or an animal state – states that, according to conventional logic, exist on one side or another of a dividing line, and which certain types of movement might transcend – to transitivity, or the movement of movement itself.

Diskurstheorie der Demokratie und Religion

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Reiß
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
Discourse Theory ◽  
Public Justification ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
General Acceptability

The debate about religion and the public sphere is characterised by a flawed alternative. While liberal opinions tend to regard religious contributions as invalid because they are unable to satisfy the principle of public justification, pro-religion inclusivists call for the principle of public justification to be limited because only in this way can religious contributions be accepted. Based on fundamental assumptions from discourse theory, this study endeavours to demonstrate that it is possible to adopt a standpoint which adheres to the principle of public justification and an epistemic understanding of democratic policy, while at the same time attempting to determine the relationship between religion and the public sphere inclusively. However, in this respect there is one belief that both political liberalism and inclusivists share: religious contributions are fundamentally unable to fulfil the criterion of general acceptability.

Enriching Discourse Theory: the Discursivematerial Knot1 As a Non-Hierarchical Ontology

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 369-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nico Carpentier
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Discourse Theory ◽  
Theoretical Development ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Critical Fields ◽  
Political Role ◽  
Constructive Dialogue

Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory has played a significant role in thinking through the political role of knowledge and ideology, without ignoring the significance of the material, also in relation to its post-Marxist agenda and the de-essentialisation of class relations. At the same time, there is a need to enrich discourse theory, by finding a better balance between the discursive and the material, and by providing a better theoretisation of the entanglement of the discursive and the material. This article remains grounded in, and loyal to, discourse theory, but aims to learn from new materialism in order to develop a non-hierarchical theory of entanglement, as a discursive-material knot. In particular, it investigates the theoreticalconceptual potential of three concepts, namely the assemblage, the invitation and the investment. This theoretical development also has strategic importance, in that it facilitates a better and more constructive dialogue between different (critical) fields, for instance, between those that are explicitly engaged with discourse theory and new materialism, but also between the emancipatory project(s) that post-Marxism advocates, namely cultural studies and (critical) political economy.

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