Materialism

This paper argues that there is currently no single definition of new materialism but at least three distinct and partly incompatible trajectories. All three of these trajectories share at least one common theoretical commitment: to problematize the anthropocentric and constructivist orientations of most twentieth-century theory in a way that encourages closer attention to the sciences by the humanities.

This paper emerges from our desire to offer a response to criticisms but not in order to defend new materialism in general. Instead, we hope to help redirect each arrow of critique toward its proper target, and on this basis to advocate for the approach we call “performative” or “pedetic” new materialism.

Discourse Studies started out as materialist and political endeavor. Many aspects of this heritage, however, seem to have gotten lost in contemporary approaches to discourse, or live on as a spectral undercurrent that remains implicit. Although Critical Discourse Analysis, the Essex School, enunciative pragmatics as well as other strands avail themselves to materialist theories and could be dubbed materialist, we believe that the relationship between discourse analysis and materialism has not been explored enough with regard to the methodological and conceptual consequences a materialist conception of discourse entails.
In this chapter, we propose to explore the entanglement of materialism and discourse analysis before and in Discourse Studies across three moments of materialist discourse analysis. This will allow drafting some criteria for a materialist study of discourse.
Our argument resonates within a broader research agenda that aims at promoting a genuinely materialist take on discourse by focusing on the relation between discourse, ideology, and political economy. We briefly introduce this perspective in the first section of this chapter.
In the second section, we claim that viable theoretical and methodological elements of a genuinely materialist approach to discourse can be found before and in what is called ‘French’ Discourse Analysis (FDA). More specifically, we argue that a materialist understanding of language and discourse is present in Marxian materialism as well as other early theorists of language and discourse, such as Bakhtin and Vološinov, who help understand discourses in their material and effective reality, as well as in relation to social conditions of power and exploitation – a first moment of materialist discourse analysis. Furthermore, we suggest that parts of Louis Althusser’s work do not merely constitute a theoretical source on which discourse analysts drew and draw, but a discourse analysis avant la lettre – and thus represents a second moment of materialist discourse analysis. We then propose to locate a third moment in the materialist political project of a group of researchers around Michel Pêcheux.
Against this background, the chapter closes with a brief discussion of four criteria that for us characterize a materialist approach to discourse. We will also point to some tensions between them, which can and need to be made productive within a materialist methodological framework.

Dit onderzoek handelt over het vraagstuk van onttovering. De onttovering van de wereld heeft een verlies aan zin en gemeenschap veroorzaakt. Omdat zowel zingeving als gemeenschapsvorming een noodzakelijk onderdeel vormen van een gezonde maatschappij, hebben verschillende denkers de wenselijkheid van een, al dan niet gedeeltelijke, herbetovering van de wereld gearticuleerd. In deze thesis zoek ik naar een bewustzijn dat opnieuw garant kan staan voor gemeenschapsvorming en zingeving door bepaalde aspecten van het betoverde denken te herontdekken. De onttovering van de wereld wordt in verband gebracht met verschillende kwalen van onze cultuur. Tegenover een onttoverde rede plaats ik een fenomenologisch en ecologisch denken dat verschillende wijsheden uit de betoverde wereld op een alternatieve wijze herontdekt en zo de concrete synthese biedt van een onttoverd en betoverd bewustzijn.