Abstract
The chapter engages in a discussion about the knotted relations between the discursive and the material, starting from the discourse-theoretical position developed by Laclau and Mouffe, which emphasizes the importance of the discursive as producing necessary but contingent frameworks of intelligentibility. Even if Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory acknowledges the importance of the material, this chapter also argues for a clearer development of the material’s capacity to intervene in the discursive. Two concepts are proposed to think this through further, namely, the dislocation and the invitation, where the former captures a more disruptive mechanism and the latter a more constructive mechanism. In the last part of the chapter, the workings of both concepts are illustrated in a case study on a Cypriot community media organization, called the Cyprus Community Media Centre (CCMC). This case study shows how the counter-hegemonic project of the CCMC, with its materials, manages to disrupt the antagonistic-nationalist discourses that circulate on this island and is simultaneously disrupted because the discursive and material components of the CCMC assemblage do not let themselves be harnessed and encapsulated that easily either.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter uses texts from Carpentier (2017).
- 2.
In this chapter, I consciously use the notion of ‘the material’—and not the notion of materiality—as the overarching notion. The choice for ‘the material’ is aligned with the ways that Laclau and Mouffe used ‘the political’ and ‘the social.’ But this choice (for the material) is also inspired by the desire to avoid focusing on ‘what makes things “thingly”.’ Here, I want to move away from an essentialist connotation of materiality, very much in line with Ingold’s (2007: 9) suggestion: ‘In urging that we take a step back, from the materiality of objects to the properties of materials, I propose that we lift the carpet, to reveal beneath its surface a tangled web of meandrine complexity, in which – among a myriad other things – oaken wasp galls get caught up with old iron, acacia sap, goose feathers and calf-skins, and the residue from heated limestone mixes with emissions from pigs, cattle, hens and bees.’
- 3.
Similar to the choice for the concept of ‘the material,’ the concept of ‘the discursive’ is used here, again in alignment with Laclau and Mouffe’s use of the concepts of ‘the political’ and ‘the social.’ The discursive is used to indicate ‘that all objects are objects of discourse, in that a condition of their meaning depends upon a socially constructed system of rules and significant differences’ (Howarth 2000: 8), while the notion of ‘discourse’ refers ‘to historically specific systems of meaning …’ (p. 9).
- 4.
Some of these critiques were discussed in Carpentier and Spinoy (2008).
- 5.
We should remain realistic about what (academic) language allows us to do and the constraints it creates. Having to work with (academic) language sometimes causes the discursive and the material component to be discussed separately, in a particular order. In these cases, one component always has to come first, but this is done without ever implying that their relationship is hierarchical.
- 6.
- 7.
This very open and materialist approach to the event is different from how the event is often used in media studies, where the notion of the mediaevent refers to the ‘televisional ceremonies’ that are ‘the high holidays of mass communication’ (Dayan and Katz 2009: 1). Even if these media events have clear material dimensions, the conceptual focus on the televisional representations of material changes renders them more specific than the notion of the event that is used here.
- 8.
To capture this engraining of meaning into the material, the concept of investment is used. The use of this concept here is inspired by how, for instance, Marres (2012: 113) used it, even if it is rather en passant, when she discussed the deployment of empirical devices in demonstrational homes and remarked: ‘it facilitates the investment of material entities with normative capacities.’
- 9.
The analysis of this participatory-agonistic assemblage, as captured in this part of the chapter, is structured by what is called a discursive-material analysis. This type of analysis translates the ontology of the discursive-material knot into methodological procedures, combining the logics of qualitative research with the deployment of the theoretical repertoire of the discourse-material knot as so-called sensitizing concepts. See Carpentier (2017: 289ff.) for a more elaborate discussion on this methodology. In practice, the analyzed data originated from a production and content analysis, a reception analysis and a one-year ethnography. See Carpentier (2017: 286ff.) for an overview of the data gathering and analysis. This chapter uses the interview data from the production and content analysis to illustrate the logics of dislocation and invitation.
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Carpentier, N. (2019). About Dislocations and Invitations: Deepening the Conceptualization of the Discursive-Material Knot. In: Marttila, T. (eds) Discourse, Culture and Organization. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94123-3_7
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