Evaluating the Credibility of Storied Matter in the Context of Agential Realism

Abstract

This study is defined within the context of the critical posthuman project of decentring humanist subjectivity. We argue that because agential realism, and the agency and performativity that go with it, do not enable non-human matter to be accountable, only human matter, in its intra-active becoming with non-human matter, can support an ethical project. Secondly, we map our understanding of Barad’s agential realism, explaining the importance of agential cuts in phenomena-in-their-becoming that are the world worlding itself, and evaluate ethics, agency, and performativity in this material-discursive framework. Thirdly, understanding the material-discursive to underpin storied matter, we engage it via some clarification of narrative, and narrative agency. We conclude that much organic or inorganic nature as non-human matter is directional and responsive, so alive and generative and, in this sense, capable of worlding itself. However, it does not tell its own stories in the process.

Keywords:

• performativity
• materiality
• posthumanism
• storied matter
• agential realism
• Na

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 There are numerous accounts of this in the Marxist literature. Among the most relevant ones is Lukács’ concept of reification, for instance, that postulates commodity stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man.

2 See Hollin et al. for a critique based on this scalar shift.

3 Indeed (and confusingly) apparatuses can be phenomena themselves (Barad, Meeting the Universe 146, 208). See page 146 in particular for six characteristics of apparatuses theorized beyond Bohr’s conception.

4 By commonplace we mean the layperson’s non-philosophical understanding of linkages (e.g., an articulated truck, the linking of railway carriages) and expression (the putting of ideas into communicable words, images, or structures) as opposed to Robert Brandom’s rationalist expressivism where it is through logical inferences as “linkages” that articulation as “expression” can occur.

5 We are aware that this questioning as expressed excludes the materiality of social systems in a Marxist sense. Whether the same can be said for institutional systems in terms of their agency and performativity is less relevant to our focus on the ecocritical, though arguably an interesting way forward for ecocriticism in terms of changing the stories that are discursively prevalent in relation to the Anthropocene’s challenges.