Politics with objects? On the affective materiality of contentious politics

Abstract

How does material culture shape contentious politics? Things, we argue, influence political contention in ways that are reducible neither to struggles over meaning nor to the thingly aspect of things. The article combines pragmatic semiotics with insights on ritual practice and collective experience. By bringing together three often separate literatures – contentious politics, material culture, and affect – we suggest a thicker understanding of agency. Agency, this article contends, is distributed between primary human actors and objects, which exercise a degree of secondary agency. Our aim is to explore how affect is stored in and channelled through seemingly ordinary objects. Political actors use these affectively charged symbol-index-icons in pursuit of various objectives; specifically, material things are shown to enable and constrain episodes of contention. As a result, our understanding of contentious politics involves not only ideas, texts, and opportunity structures but also the objects that help make social and political change possible.