Materializing discourse analysis with James, Schmitt and Latour

Pepijn Van Eeden

doi:10.1057/palcomms.2017.39

Abstract

This article describes a turn from a regular discourse analytical perspective to a radical empiricist sensibility and “new materialist” approach, triggered by studying the remarkable wave of political ecology movements in Eastern Europe in the years around the collapse of state socialism. Such a “turn” is not new in itself. Most importantly, it has been pioneered in science and technology studies— in the work of Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, John Law and Donna Haraway. More recently it has been picked up in political theory, by Jane Bennett among others, and is currently gaining momentum with the advent of the Anthropocene, the epoch in which mankind has become the predominant geological determinant, turning the biophysical sciences from a politically “neutral” domain into one that stands today at the heart of political debate. When it comes to the current discourse analysis community, however, taking biophysical actors and materiality into account, as co-shaping political processes, turns out to have its own particular intricacies. In the first part of this study two of the most influential schools in English-language discourse analysis are reviewed in this light — Essex Discourse Theory (DT) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) — focusing on their approach to political ecology and global warming. It appears that CDA, to make strong critique possible, assumes it must project a separate world of intransient ‘real’ relational structures behind discourse, leading to insensibility over the agency of materiality, animals or physical things, as CDA associates them with this intransient world. DT, on the other hand, relies on Derridean post-structuralism, and refuses to separate a static extra-discursive realm, but tends to regress into narrow linguistic reductionism. In the second part of the study, a three-stepped procedure is proposed for solving these problems, as an expansion of “new materialist” political theory thus far, and an anchor point for further discussion among discourse analysts. It consists of: (1) breaking with the reservations to empiricism, within both the DT and CDA community, by adopting the “radical empiricism” of American pragmatist William James; (2) rooting politicality in materiality by turning to the controversial Carl Schmitt, which reverses critical realist approaches to politicization; (3) drawing material and biophysical objects, humans, and language in the same analytical orbit, without abolishing difference overall, as achieved by Bruno Latour among others. Finally, the third part of this paper shows how the approach that so emerges answers the aporia in CDA and DT, provides a note on its methodic consequences, and emphasizes intersections between current ecological crises, the Anthropocene, and feminist and postcolonial theory, which should further convince that turning to materiality today is rather congruent with the equalitarian and participatory aims of discourse analysts—but also places an urgent call to do away with classic forms of critical realism, and make work of breaking with nature-culture divisionism.

Highlights

I describe a turn from the regular discourse analytical perspective to a radical empiricist attitude and “new materialist” sensibility
In view of technological developments and ecological upheaval, objects and things are bound to become ever more pressing in the policies and politics of the years to come, and enlarging the current domain of political analysis, for taking them into account properly, is of particular urgency
As Hay exemplifies, many engaged socio-political researchers assume an authoritative and intransitive space “beneath the surface” where notions like “power”, “critique”, “social inequality” or “discourse” can be grounded before changing the world through being critical: in their answer to the question of stability, those in the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) community tend to agree that we are “subject to constraints that do not emanate from the discursive level but from structural relations of dependence, such as class, ethnicity, gender” and so on (Rear, 2013: 12–13)

Summary

Introduction

I describe a turn from the regular discourse analytical perspective to a radical empiricist attitude and “new materialist” sensibility. As Hay exemplifies, many engaged socio-political researchers assume an authoritative and intransitive space “beneath the surface” where notions like “power”, “critique”, “social inequality” or “discourse” can be grounded before changing the world through being critical: in their answer to the question of stability, those in the CDA community tend to agree that we are “subject to constraints that do not emanate from the discursive level but from structural relations of dependence, such as class, ethnicity, gender” and so on (Rear, 2013: 12–13). The approach of CDA practitioners to ecological questions, materiality, and biophysical object and things—clouds, particles, fabrics, aquifers, robots—can be construed along these lines as well: they are directly governed by this grand body of invisible structural relations, known as the Laws of Nature This is more than clear from Sjölander’s notes on the CDA-DT roundtable discussions, on the subject of “extra-discursive reality”. Corporate discourses can be “criticized” to reveal the corrupted or fallacious character of “neoliberal structures” behind it—but the threat that such critique is supposed to represent is without real danger, essentially because the activity of actual objects, actual physicality, the body, the coal that is burned, the honeybee, jellyfish, chemically polluted clouds, garments, nuclear particles in the Dnepr, perhaps the “means of production” to stay with Marx, are neglected, considered politically inactive, impossible to mobilize with or against

PART 2 resolves

Conclusion