Abstract
This chapter introduces key features of actor-network theory and approaches in its vicinity that together can be called material semiotics. In material semiotics the subject as well as materiality are seen as relational effects. After discussing the methodological suspension of dichotomies and presenting the language of material semiotics as inspired by narrative theory and the semiotics of Greimas, the author introduces a ‘materiality of materialization’ and presents the subject of material semiotics as an effect of rhizomatic material assemblages. As such, the subject can be understood as a black box.
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Notes
- 1.
Latour writes ‘it would be fairly accurate to describe ANT as being half Garfinkel and half Greimas’ (Latour 2005, p. 54, n. 54).
- 2.
We could add: ‘meaning and materiality, big and small’ (Law 2009, p. 147), ‘material and social’ (cf. Latour 2005, pp. 75–76), ‘words and world, society and nature, mind and matter’ (Latour 1999b, p. 267), ‘person and network’ (Callon and Law 1997, p. 169), ‘human/animal’ (Latour and Callon 1981, p. 284), ‘human action and material causality’ (Latour 2005, p. 85), or Haraway’s ‘troubling dualisms’ of ‘self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man’ (Haraway 2004, p. 35).
- 3.
In Harman’s characterization, Latour ‘always insists that we cannot philosophize from raw first principles but must follow objects in action and describe what we see. Empirical studies are more important for him than for almost any other philosopher’ (Harman 2009, p. 14).
- 4.
For scientific probity’s sake, we should note that Greimas concept of actants of a narrative owes a great deal to Propp’s dramatis personæ, which consists of the villain, the donor, the helper, the sought-for person (and her father), the dispatcher, the hero and the false hero (cf. Greimas 1983, p. 201). Terry Eagleton puts it nicely when he writes, in Literary Studies: ‘A. J. Greimas’s Sémantique structurale, finding Propp’s scheme still too empirical, is able to abstract his account even further by the concept of an actant, which is neither a specific narrative even nor a character but a structural unit. The six actants of Subject and Object, Sender and Receiver, Helper and Opponent can subsume Propp’s various spheres of action and make for an even more elegant simplicity’ (Eagleton 1996, p. 91).
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Beetz, J. (2016). Material Semiotics and the Rhizomatic Subject. In: Materiality and Subject in Marxism, (Post-)Structuralism, and Material Semiotics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59837-0_6
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