Coole, Diana (2013) Agentic capacities and capacious historical materialism: thinking with new materialisms in the political sciences. Millennium - Journal of International Studies 41 (3), pp. 451-469. ISSN 0305-8298.
Abstract
In this article, I note that the idea of a new materialist turn has recently been gathering steam. The first part considers some of the signature elements of the new materialisms. The most distinctive aspect identified here is the invocation of a generative or vital ontology of immanence. Following discussion of some of its principal claims, the article draws out its implications for reconceptualising agency, in particular regarding the way agentic capacities are recognised to be distributed across animate, and perhaps also inanimate, entities. The significance of this development for the political sciences is then explored. In a second part, I suggest that the new materialism entails a normative project. Here, ethical overtures towards a new sensitivity predicated on vital materialist insights are contrasted with a renewed critical theory. The latter is commended as a material reckoning of the 21st century: a project provisionally labelled a capacious historical materialism.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | Agency critical theory, Foucault, Latour, materialism, power |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Birkbeck Centre for British Political Life |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 03 Jun 2013 12:14 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:05 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/7197 |
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