New Materialisms, discourse analysis, and International Relations: a radical intertextual approach

Abstract

This article investigates the recent ‘New Materialisms’ turn in social and political thought and asks what the potential theoretical and methodological significance might be for the study of International Relations (IR). To do so we return to debates about the theoretical status of discourse in IR as it is in this context that the question of materiality – particularly as it relates to language – has featured prominently in recent years. While the concept of discourse is increasingly narrow in IR, the ‘New Materialisms’ literature emphasises the political force of materiality beyond language and representation. However, a move to reprioritise the politics of materiality over that of language and representation is equally problematic since it perpetuates rather than challenges the notion of a prior distinction between language and materiality. In response, we draw on earlier poststructural thought in order to displace this dichotomy and articulate an extended understanding of what analysing ‘discourse’ might mean in the study of IR.

“We are not animals!” Humanitarian border security and zoopolitical spaces in EUrope1

“…3 'Irregularity' is used in inverted commas throughout to denaturalise the category (see Squire 2011). 4 For a lengthier discussion of the Foucaultian approach to 'discourse' used in this paper see Lundborg and Vaughan-Williams (2014). 5 Under the terms of the 2008 EU Directive on Minimum Standards for the Reception of Asylum Seekers detention should only be used as an 'exceptional measure' (EU 2008).…”

Reshaping critical geopolitics? The materialist challenge

“…70 Importantly, the emphasis on intra-action over inter-action is indicative of the ways in which these different elements are effectively inseparable. While Barad's position has been criticised for invoking a divide between the material and the discursive in the very joining of the two, 71 I conceive the emphasis on intra-action as indicative of Barad's understanding of the mutual imbrication of the material and the discursive. In this respect, Barad continues a longer trajectory of research that involves a more sophisticated conception of discourse, while arguably going further by highlighting processes of de/materialisation as integral to our very categories of analysis.…”

Peirce’s semeiotics: a methodology for bridging the material–ideational divide in IR scholarship

“…It is not clear how exactly material things can at least partly create meaning and have constitutive effects upon humans. Unless we develop appropriate methodological tools, there is a danger that New Materialists will fall into the trap of functionalism and focus on process tracing a series of material effects and their impacts (Aradau 2010; Lundborg and Vaughan-Williams 2014; Mitchell 2014), that they will return to purely discursive modes of analysis, or that they will fall prey to the critique that they are analyzing without any systematicity personalized impressionistic affects that certain kinds of matter leave upon them. Thus Bennett, one of the most cited New Materialist scholars in the social sciences, has difficulties specifying her methodology.…”

“…Others reach much further and attribute a certain independent vitality to matter, with which they explain a vast array of phenomena, including the impressions garbage leaves on us, the operations of electricity grids, and the effects of food on our moods (Bennett 2010). We can loosely group these strands of scholarship under the heading of New Materialisms, even as the authors differ on the degree of autonomy, agency, and effects they attribute to matter (Coole and Frost 2010; Srnicek, Fotou, and Arghand 2013; Lundborg and Vaughan-Williams 2015). Common to all New Materialists is the view that matter plays an irreducible role in social relations and does not entirely depend upon what people make of it.…”