Agentic Capacities and Capacious Historical Materialism: Thinking with New Materialisms in the Political Sciences

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 41, Issue 3, 2013, Pages 451-469

  Coole, Diana ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Agency; critical theory; Foucault; Latour; materialism; power

Indexed keywords

EID: 84878838343     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0305829813481006     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds, The New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
2. See also Iris van der Tuin, 'New Feminist Materialisms', Women's Studies International Forum 34 (2011): 271-7.
3. See, for example, G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Athlone Press, 1994)
4. D. Coole, Negativity and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000).
5. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), ch. 4.
6. Deleuze J and Guattari write: ";what metal and metallurgy bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden'. ";The relation between metallurgy and alchemy reposes. on the immanent power of corporeality in all matter, and on the esprit de corps accompanying it.' A Thousand Plateaus (London: Athlone Press, 1988), 411.
7. See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 4. Compare this with Heidegger's 'worldless' stone, the poor animal environment and the human world of disclosing, as discussed by Agamben in The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), chs 12 and 13.
8. Agamben, The Open, 15f.
9. D. Coole, 'Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities', Political Studies 53 (March 2005): 124-42.
10. See, for example, Jane Bennett's essay in The New Materialisms (2010) and Karen Barad, 'Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801-31
11. and also Barad, Meeting the Universe Half Way: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
12. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1962).
13. See Agamben's wonderful improvisation on Uexkull's account of the tick's Umwelt, here. The Open, 45-7.
14. W. Wheeler and L. Williams, editorial: 'The Animals Turn', New Formations 76 (2012): 5-7, 6.
15. B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 72.
16. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 53, 67.
17. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 44.
18. See, for example, Bennett's Vibrant Matter.
19. H. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 39.
20. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. xiv: ";The ethical task at hand here is to cultivate the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perceptually open to it.
21. See also Bennett's The Enchantment of Modern Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
22. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 15, 10, 17ff.
23. Ibid., 111, 113.
24. The Royal Society, People and the Planet (London, 2012), 104. Available to download from: http://royalsociety.org/uploadedFiles/Royal_Society_Content/policy/projects/people-planet/201204-25-PeoplePlanet.pdf
25. These are just a few samples of a pervasive realist and materialist emphasis in Foucault's Discipline and Punish (London: Penguin, 1977), 222, 223, 225, 303.
26. Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
27. Latour Reassembling the Social, 22.
28. B. Foran and F. Poldy, ";Future Dilemmas: Options to 2050 for Australia's Population, Technology, Resources and Environment', a CSIRO technical report for the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (2002), available at: www.cse.CSIRO.au/futuredilemmas/
29. GEO-5 includes numerous graphs, databases and reports that can be downloaded from: www.unep.org For a useful summary and overview of the findings included in GEO-5,
30. see UNEP, Keeping Track of Our Changing Environment: From Rio to Rio+20 (1992-2012) (Nairobi: UNEP, Division of Early Warning and Assessment, 2011).