Speculations on the political agency of public MatterBio

Abstract

Beatrice Dube’s article directs those engaged in the study of discourse to an important line of inquiry: while states and governments may evolve political policies may not, and the persistence of these policies, including those that continue practices of inequality, may be rooted in the continuation of certain practices of discourse. In her analysis of the inability of water allocation reform in South Africa to ‘promote equitable access of water for all,’ Dube moves the discussion away from associating the policy’s failure with structural constraints, leading us instead to the persistence of a discourse that promotes what she characterizes as ‘deficit thinking.’ This discourse, espoused through various strata of South African society, defines black individuals as incapable of being ‘active and productive water users as well as competent government officials.’ Dube’s research offers a clear example of the influence of discourse in shaping bodies, beliefs, and practices, but it also leaves us to consider the availability of alternatives and challenges to the prevailing ideology and discourse. In this brief commentary, I want to promote discussion of the possibilities afforded by the recent turn to the material as a means to identify the emergence of public agency and alternative discourses and the potential for such material-discursive becoming to advance social change. With the increasing contemporary presence of a wide range of material objects central to human existence, numerous intellectuals during the past decade have positioned matter as an active force that constitutes not just the material world but also the social world (Latour 2005; Bennett 2010; Barad 2007: Braidotti 2013). Granting matter agency is driven not just by the ubiquity of materiality but also by the suggested limits of the linguistic and representational construction of reality. More than just a product of the symbolic, reality is also constituted through the relations among objects, with the becoming of the world a product of other-than-human actions. The intellectual movement, which for the sake of conciseness I will refer to as new materialism, is not without detractors, with some questioning the merits of the approach based on definitions of agency, a neglect of power, a reliance on metaphysical attunement, and an overly optimistic promise of a more ethical and just world (Malm 2018; Lettow 2017; Rekret 2016; Washick et al. 2015). As with all knowledge work, the challenges to new materialism should not be cause to negate the approach but should rather serve as prompts by which to reconsider and refine the relation between matter and discourse. Dube’s example of water allocation reform in South Africa offers an excellent opportunity to further explore the relation,